“They see who is being killed.” How the Russians are hunting civilians in Kherson — an investigation by the Ukrainian BBC

““They see who is being killed.” How the Russians hunt civilians in Kherson — an investigation by BBC Ukraine November 1, 20:27 Share: Russians use drones to attack not only military, but also civilian targets (Photo: BBC) BBC heard eyewitness accounts and saw reliable evidence that in the front-line Kherson Russians deliberately attack civilians with drones. NV publishes the investigation of Yogita Limaje on the rights of the information partnership. Once at noon, an entrepreneur”, — write on: ua.news

“They see who is being killed.” How the Russians are hunting civilians in Kherson — an investigation by the Ukrainian BBC

November 1, 20:27

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One day at noon, businessman Serhiy Dobrovolskyi returned to his home in Kherson. He went out into the yard, smoked a cigarette and chatted with his neighbor. Suddenly, they heard a drone buzzing overhead.

Angela, Sergey’s wife, says she saw her husband running and hiding when the drone dropped the grenade.

“He died before the ambulance arrived. I was told he was very unlucky because a shrapnel pierced his heart,” she says through tears. They were married for 32 years.

Serhiy is one of 30 civilians who died as a result of a sudden surge of Russian drone attacks in Kherson since July 1, the regional military administration told the BBC. They recorded more than 5,000 drone attacks during that period, resulting in more than 400 civilian casualties.

Drones have changed the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine, and both sides are using them against military targets.

However, the BBC has heard eyewitness accounts and seen credible evidence that Russia is also using drones against civilians in the frontline city of Kherson.

“They see who is being killed, says Angela. “Do they really want to fight like this, just bombing people walking down the street?”

If it is confirmed that Russia is deliberately striking civilians, it will be a war crime.

The Russian military did not respond to questions from the BBC about the allegations. Since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Russia has consistently denied any deliberate attacks against civilians.

BBC/Imogen Anderson

Evidence of drone attacks on civilians can be seen in numerous videos shared on Ukrainian and Russian social networks, six of which were verified by the BBC Verify team.

In each video, we see through the camera of a remote operator how they track the movements of a pedestrian or a motorist in plainclothes, often dropping grenades, which, judging by the video, sometimes seriously injure or kill the victim.

BBC Verify was also able to identify the Telegram channel that contains the oldest publicly available copies of five of the six videos analysed.

Each of them was posted with appeals and threats to Ukrainians, including statements that all vehicles are legitimate targets and that people should minimize their movements. The victims were also insulted and called names “pigs”, and in one case they were mocked for being women.

The account that posted some of those drone videos also posted pictures of boxed and unboxed drones and other images of the equipment, thanking people for their donations.

BBC

The Kherson Regional Military Administration told the BBC that Russia has changed the type of drones, so the city’s electronic warfare systems can no longer intercept most of them.

“You feel that you are constantly being hunted, as if someone is constantly watching you and can drop explosives at any moment. This is the worst,” says Khrystyna Sinya, who works at the aid center located just a kilometer from the Dnipro River.

To get to the center without being chased by drones, we drive at high speed, park under the cover of trees, and then quickly head inside the buildings.

On the shelf behind Christina, a small device confirms the threat from outside — it buzzes every time it detects a drone. During our stay, it buzzed every few minutes, often signaling the presence of at least four drones.

On the faces of residents who leave their homes only to stock up on food, traces of psychological trauma are visible. Valentina Mykolaivna wipes tears from her eyes: “We are in a terrible situation. When we go out, we go from one tree to another, hiding. Every day they attack public buses, every day they drop bombs on us with the help of drones,” she says.

Olena Kryvchun says that she narrowly avoided a drone hitting her car. Minutes before she was due to get into her car after visiting a friend, a bomb fell on the roof above the driver’s seat, tearing off one side of the car, turning it into a distorted mess of metal, plastic and glass.

“If I had been in the car, I would have died. I look like a military man, does my car look like a military man?” says the woman. She works as a cleaner, and she needed the car for work. She has no money to fix it.

Elena says that drones are scarier than shelling.

“When we hear a shell fire from across the river, we have time to react. With drones, it’s easy to miss their sound. They are fast, they see you and hit you,” she says.

Ben Dusing, who runs the aid center, says drones spread more fear than shelling, they paralyze people.

“If the drone targets you, it’s game over at this point. There is no defense against that,” he says.

Over the past few months, says Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, the spokesman for the Kherson Regional Military Administration, the Russian military has also started using drones for remote mining of pedestrian, car and bus routes.

According to him, the explosions are caused by butterfly mines – small anti-personnel mines that fall to the ground and detonate later on contact. For the purpose of masking, they are covered with leaves.

The BBC could not verify the use of drones to drop mines in Kherson.

BBC

Olena says that with the approach of winter, the fear of drones will increase.

“When the leaves fall from the trees, there will be many more victims. Because if you’re on the street, there’s nowhere to hide,” she says.

How we verified drone footage

We were able to identify the shooting location of the six analyzed videos by comparing the characteristic features on the city streets. All of them were filmed in the eastern part of Kherson.

In one case — k when a drone dropped explosives on two pedestrians and one of them was so badly injured that he could not walk, it was a turn at a T-junction that pointed to the Dnipro district or the nearby suburb of Antonivka, not the city center.

Once we identified a possible location, we were able to match visible landmarks in the video with satellite images—in this case, houses and pylons—confirming exactly where the attack took place.

To try to establish where the videos were first published, we ran a few frames from each through the search engines. Often, the first result was a separate Telegram channel, from which reposts on sites such as X or Reddit took place within a few hours.

By knowing the location of each attack, we were able to calculate the time of the shooting using the shadows and cross-check with the weather information to find the most likely date.

Four of the videos we reviewed were posted to a Telegram channel the day after the alleged shooting, and in one case, the video was posted eight hours later on the same day.

The material was prepared with the participation of Imogen Anderson, Anastasia Levchenko and Volodymyr Lozhko. Verification by Richard Irvine-Brown

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