Nothing is more comforting to the residents of Kherson these days than the sight of bad weather.
As the clouds gather, the rain pours and the winds blow across this town in southern Ukraine, the locals try to go about their business – feeling a pause, at least temporarily, in the horror that filled their skies.
Since mid-summer, the civilians of Kherson have been the target of an experiment unprecedented in modern European warfare: a coordinated Russian campaign to empty the city by stalking its inhabitants with attack drones.
The killer machines, sometimes in swarms, hover over homes, buzz into buildings and chase people through the streets in their cars, on bicycles or simply on foot. The targets are not soldiers or tanks, but civilian life.
“They are hunting us,” said Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson regional military administration. “Imagine what that does to a person, the psychological effect.”
Some content cannot be loaded. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
Videos show Russian drone operators targeting moving civilian vehicles
Since mid-July, Kherson and its neighboring villages along the west side of the Dnieper River have suffered more than 9,500 attacks by small drones, killing at least 37 people and injuring hundreds more, according to Prokudin, regional prosecutors and police.
Prokudin told the Financial Times that Russia had deployed some of its “best drone units” across the Dnieper River, which bisects the Kherson and serves as a front line. From the coast opposite the center of the city, he said, the Russians are launching advanced drone models, perfecting combat techniques and training new operators for their increasingly intense invasion.
Dozens of videos of drone attacks on civilians have been posted on Russian military and pro-war Telegram channels. The Eyes on Russia project of the Center for Information Resilience (CIR), a non-profit organization based in London focused on exposing human rights abuses and war crimes, analyzed and verified 90 of them in a new report — video catalog of drone attacks.
CIR found that the “vast majority” of attacks were against either moving or stationary vehicles – targets that are “difficult to replicate in a test environment”. It is suspected, on the Ukrainian side, that Kherson was also used for “shooting exercises,” Prokudin and other officials said.
The devices used, including first-person-view (FPV) drones, Chinese over-the-counter Mavics and sometimes larger Russian military lancets, focus on vulnerable, everyday places: crowded markets, gas stations, coffee shops, post offices and service centers. humanitarian aid.
One caught Serhiya, 50, early one morning in November, shortly after he left his apartment. He hadn’t heard a drone overhead for nearly an hour, but he hadn’t counted on the Russians leaving something in the pile of leaves: a small anti-personnel mine called a “petal” that flutters downward when dropped from the air.
“I fell to the ground and then I noticed that my foot was missing,” Serhiy said from his hospital bed.
The Russians package the petals in tubes that hang from small quadcopter drones, then scatter them in streets, yards, playgrounds and squares.
Serhiy said that everyone in the Kherson area knows someone who was killed, wounded or was lucky to survive one of the drone attacks. Before his foot was blown off, his 69-year-old neighbor lost an arm when a Russian drone dropped a grenade on the man.
In the bed across the hospital room sat 73-year-old Viktor, who also encountered a petal mine fired from a Russian drone; he raised his left leg to an FT reporter to show where his foot had been before it was severed in the blast.
Killer drones are so widespread in Kherson that many people now carry small detectors that notify them when they hover nearby. Oleksiy, a local artist and cafe owner, keeps one next to him as he makes coffee for his customers. The detector can distinguish between types of drones.
Others are taking even more drastic measures to avoid drones. Volodymyr said he leaves home on his motorcycle only after sunset, deliberately riding without lights on to avoid detection from the sky.
Russian drones, many of which were once primarily used for photography and video recording, are equipped with grenades and improvised explosive devices. Many carry even larger explosives, including anti-tank mines and RPG warheads that strike their targets, kamikaze-style. They have a range of up to 15 km, fly at low altitudes and run at speeds in excess of 100 km per hour, making them difficult to track and eliminate.
Military vehicles, ambulances, police cars, fire engines and humanitarian convoys are favorite targets.
Ukrainian officials suspect the attack is part of a Russian plan to increase pressure on Kiev before Donald Trump returns to the White House, accelerating battlefield gains and preparing for a potential breakthrough across the Dnieper River.
“Russia wants to launch another offensive here,” Prokudin said, adding that Russian forces had gathered “300 boats to cross the river.”
Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the southern forces of Ukraine’s volunteer army, said Russian troops were trying to seize river islands and move closer to Kherson’s western coast. They recently launched a major attack on Kozatskyi Island northeast of the city, near Nova Kakhovka.
Some content cannot be loaded. Check your internet connection or browser settings.
Two videos showing a white van being targeted by a drone. The video is shown from above and from the ground.
The developments in Kherson come as Moscow’s forces elsewhere make their fastest territorial gains since the first weeks of the 2022 invasion.
In the past month alone, Russia has seized an area roughly half the size of London in the eastern Donetsk region, according to Deep State, a Ukrainian war monitoring group close to the defense ministry, and the FT’s own calculations. They threaten Ukrainian control over the strategic cities of Pokrovsk, Kurakhove and Velyka Novosilka, and the Dnipropetrovsk region — the backbone of Ukraine’s military operations in the east — is in sight.
Kherson would be an even bigger prize. It was the first regional Ukrainian capital to be captured by Russian forces since the February 2022 all-out invasion, spending nine months under occupation before being liberated in Ukraine’s latest successful counter-offensive.
Since then, Russia has fired heavy artillery, rockets, cruise bombs and ballistic missiles at Kherson and surrounding villages along the Dnieper River.
Drone attacks hastened the exodus of civilians from the area. The Kherson region’s population of one million has dropped to just 158,000 since the Russian invasion. The city of Kherson had 250,000 inhabitants; today there are only 60,000 of them.
Tetyana Aksenchuk, a 49-year-old resident of the neighboring village of Veletenske, said that drones circle around houses and people “like birds.” Sometimes five of them at once, armed with explosives, will roam residential buildings, business premises and public places where people gather, waiting to spot a target. “If they see any movement, they immediately attack,” she said.
Russian drones can also carry incendiary bombs that set fire to houses and fields. The wind from the river valley fuels the flames that jump from building to building.
Aksenchuk was seriously injured after rushing to put out fires from a coordinated drone and rocket attack; two of the three ambulances that came to treat her were then blown apart by another swarm of bomb-carrying drones.
Several medics were injured, and one driver was killed. “I watched this,” Aksenchuk said. “He was sitting behind the wheel and burning.”
Aksenchuk lost her left arm below the elbow and now needs several key surgeries to save her crushed left leg. About 100,000 hryvnias ($2,400) will need to be collected for the operation. If the doctors fail to save her leg, she will need about 500,000 hryvnias for a prosthesis and the installation of a titanium rod. The cost is far beyond her means.
“If I don’t have money for implants, the doctor said he will cut off my leg,” she said through tears.
Back in Kherson, Porkudin noted ominously that the stormy weather would soon clear and the skies would once again be filled with death machines targeting his city.
“Rain, wind and clouds keep drones away,” Prokudin said. “The weather in London is now our ideal time.”
Additional contributions by Emma Lewis
