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Yesterday Odessa hit all the news feeds. Unfortunately, the reason for this was not at all joyful: about forty dead and several hundred wounded. It so happened that I caught these events from the very beginning and almost to the very end. I started writing about them yesterday, but I realized that I definitely wouldn’t be able to do it until the morning, because there were too many photos, so I went to bed and finished everything this morning. There will be a lot of text and even more photos. There will be no photographs of the bodies, who wants extreme sports can go to any news site.

First, a little background for those who do not live in Odessa and are not aware of the events that took place here earlier. Until yesterday, there were two camps in Odessa, they can be conditionally called "pro-Ukrainian" and "pro-Russian".karta Both camps held rallies, gatherings, marches around the city, which ended with a maximum of local skirmishes and small fights. There were no serious clashes before in Odessa, and on May 1, pro-Russian supporters held a march in the city, which no one interfered with. Pro-Russian activists also founded a permanent camp on one of the city squares, Kulikovo Pole, which served as a "bridgehead" for their gatherings. Clashes in Odessa By the way, just a day or two before yesterday's events, a split occurred in their ranks and some people from this camp moved in a completely different part of the city. Opinions are now being expressed that the split was provoked precisely by the preparation of part of the Kulikovo field activists for yesterday's events.

We finish with the background, move on to yesterday's events. Yesterday, football clubs Metalist (Kharkiv) and Chernomorets (Odessa) were supposed to play in Odessa. Fans of these football clubs announced the march "For the unity of Ukraine", which was supposed to pass through the streets of the city, after which it would end at the Chernomorets stadium. Clashes in Odessa-1 The march was scheduled for three hours on Cathedral Square (Soborka). Since it is always interesting for me to photograph such events, somewhere at half past two I moved towards the Soborka. I did not reach it, because at the corner of Zhukovsky and Aleksandrovsky Prospekt I came across a group of armed men.