Huge Russian Armada Spotted as Ukraine Braces for Amphibious Assault

Videos showing a powerful Russian naval force in the Black Sea have begun appearing on social media and have started to go viral.

Two videos posted by Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a U.S. think tank, have been viewed over 800,000 times.

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson also took to Twitter to say that Russian warships have left Crimea and are heading to Odessa.

"An amphibious assault on Ukraine's third-largest city could come as soon as Thursday: U.S. officials," he said in a tweet.

People in Odessa, a city of a million residents on Ukraine's southern coast, were filmed putting up sandbag fortifications on a beach this week in preparation for a possible attack, LBC reported, adding that previous attempts to launch an assault on the city had been aborted due to bad weather.

Russia's assault on Ukraine has faced significant resistance across the country, according to the Pentagon.

Most notably, President Vladimir Putin's forces have been unable so far to take the capital, Kyiv.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told a news briefing on Wednesday that a 40-mile convoy of Russian military vehicles spotted near Kyiv—and more broadly the Russian push from the north towards the capital—remained stalled.

"They haven't, from our best estimates ... made any appreciable progress geographically speaking in the last 24 to 36 hours, and again nothing very significant. It is difficult for us to know with great specificity all that is going into this stall," he said.

"In general we believe there are a couple of reasons for that. One, we believe the Russians are deliberately regrouping themselves and reassessing the progress that they have not made and how to make up for lost time.

"Two, we do believe that they have experienced logistic and sustainment challenges. Challenges that we don't believe they fully anticipated.

"Three, they are getting resistance from the Ukrainians. We have some indications, nothing that we can 100 percent independently verify, that the Ukrainians have in fact tried to slow down that convoy."

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly called for Putin to end his invasion.

On social media, he has called for support from European nations and NATO and for countries around the world to condemn Russia's actions.

At an emergency session of the General Assembly on Wednesday, 141 of the 193 member states of the United Nations backed a resolution condemning Russia's invasion.

Zelensky took to Twitter to show a list of the countries that voted in favor, what countries abstained and who voted against.

"I praise the approval by the [United Nations General Assembly] with an unprecedented majority of votes of the resolution with a strong demand to Russia to immediately stop the treacherous attack on [Ukraine]", he said in his tweet.

"I'm grateful to everyone and every state that voted in favor, You have chosen the right side of history."