Russia uses civilians as ‘target practice’ for killer drones

There is little more comforting to the people of Kherson these days than the sight of bad weather.

When clouds gather, rain pours and winds sweep through this southern Ukrainian city, locals take their cue to run errands — sensing a pause, at least temporarily, in the terror that has filled their skies.

Kherson’s civilians have been, since midsummer, the target of an experiment without precedent in modern European warfare: a concerted Russian campaign to empty a city by stalking its residents with attack drones.  

The killer machines, sometimes by the swarm, hover above homes, buzz into buildings and chase people down streets in their cars, riding 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 impact.”

Since mid-July, Kherson and its neighbouring villages along the western side of the Dnipro river have suffered more than 9,500 attacks with 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 Dnipro river, which bisects Kherson and serves as the front line. From the bank opposite the city centre, he said, the Russians were launching advanced drone models, refining combat techniques and training new operators for their intensifying invasion. 

Scores of videos of drone attacks on civilians are posted on Russian military and pro-war Telegram channels. The Eyes on Russia project by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), a London-based non-profit focused on exposing human rights abuses and war crimes, analysed and verified 90 of them in a new report — a video catalogue of the drone onslaught.

The CIR found that the “overwhelming majority” of attacks were either against moving or stationary vehicles — targets that are “difficult to replicate in a test environment”. The suspicion, on the Ukrainian side, is that Kherson was also being used for “target practice”, 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, zero in on vulnerable, everyday locations: crowded markets, petrol stations, cafés, post offices and humanitarian aid centres.

One caught Serhiy, 50, early on a November morning, soon after he left his apartment. He had not heard a drone overhead for almost an hour, but had not reckoned on the Russians leaving something in a pile of leaves: a small anti-personnel mine dubbed the “petal” that flutters down when airdropped.

“I fell to the ground and then I noticed that I was missing my foot,” Serhiy said from a hospital bed.

The Russians pack the petals into tubes that are dangled from small quadcopter drones, then scatter them along streets, courtyards, playgrounds and public squares.

Serhiy said everyone in the Kherson area knows someone who was killed, wounded or lucky to have survived one of the drone attacks. Before his foot was blown off, his 69-year-old neighbour lost an arm when a Russian drone dropped a grenade on top of the man.

Sitting in the bed across the hospital room from Serhiy was 73-year-old Viktor, who also encountered a petal mine dropped from a Russian drone; he lifted his left leg towards an FT reporter to gesture to where his foot had been before it was severed in a blast.

The killer drones are so prevalent in Kherson that many people now carry small detectors that notify them when they are hovering nearby. Oleksiy, a local artist and café owner, keeps one by his side while he brews coffee for his customers. The detector is able to distinguish between drone types.

Others take even more drastic measures to avoid the drones. Volodymyr said he only leaves the house on a motorcycle after sunset, deliberately riding without his headlights switched on to avoid detection from the skies.

The Russian drones, many of which were once used primarily for photography and videography, are equipped with grenades and improvised explosives. Many carry even bigger explosives, including anti-tank mines and RPG warheads that slam into their targets, kamikaze style. They have ranges up to 15km, fly at low altitudes and zip around at speeds of more than 100km per hour, making them difficult to track and take down.

Military vehicles, ambulances, police cars, fire trucks and humanitarian convoys are the favoured targets.

Ukrainian officials suspect the assault is part of Russia’s plan to ratchet up pressure on Kyiv before Donald Trump returns to the White House, accelerating battlefield gains and preparing for a potential push across the Dnipro river. 

“Russia wants to launch another offensive here,” said Prokudin, adding that Russian forces had assembled “300 boats to cross the river”.

Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian volunteer army’s southern forces, said Russian troops were trying to seize the river islands and move closer to Kherson’s western bank. They had recently conducted a large attack on Kozatskyi island north-east of the city, near Nova Kakhovka.

The developments in Kherson are happening as Moscow’s forces elsewhere are making their fastest territorial gains since the early weeks of the 2022 invasion. 

In just the past month, Russia has captured an area roughly half the size of London in the eastern Donetsk region, according to Deep State, a Ukrainian war-tracking group close to the defence ministry and the FT’s own calculations. They are threatening Ukraine’s hold on the strategic cities of Pokrovsk, Kurakhove and Velyka Novosilka, and are in sight of the Dnipropetrovsk region — a linchpin of Ukraine’s military operations across the east.

Kherson would be an even bigger prize. It was the first regional Ukrainian capital to be captured by Russian forces after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, spending nine months under occupation before it was liberated in Ukraine’s last successful counteroffensive.

Since then Russia has unleashed heavy artillery, rockets, glide bombs and ballistic missiles on Kherson and its surrounding villages along the Dnipro river. 

The drone attacks have accelerated a civilian exodus from the area. Kherson region’s 1mn population has plummeted to just 158,000 since Russia’s invasion. Kherson city had 250,000 residents; today, there are just 60,000.

Tetyana Aksenchuk, a 49-year-old resident of the neighbouring Veletenske village, said drones circled homes and people “like birds”. Sometimes five of them at once, armed with explosives, will loiter over apartment buildings, businesses and public places where people gather, waiting to spot a target. “If they see any movement, they immediately attack,” she said.

The Russian drones can also carry incendiary bombs, which set fires to homes and fields. The wind from the river valley fuels the flames, which jump from building to building.

Aksenchuk was badly injured after she rushed to put out the fires from a co-ordinated drone and rocket attack; two of the three ambulances that came to treat her were then ripped apart by another swarm of bomb-carrying drones. 

Several medics were injured and one driver was killed. “I watched this,” said Aksenchuk. “He was sitting behind the wheel and burning.”

Aksenchuk lost her left arm below the elbow and now requires several crucial operations to save her shattered left leg. She will need to come up with about 100,000 hryvnia ($2,400), for the surgery. If the doctors are unable to save her leg, she’ll need about 500,000 hryvnia for a prosthetic and titanium rod implant. The cost is well beyond her means.

“If I don’t have money for implants, the doctor said they would cut off my leg,” she said through tears.

Back in Kherson, Porkudin noted ominously that the stormy weather would clear up soon, and the skies would again fill with the death machines targeting his city.

“Rain, wind and clouds keep the drones away,” Prokudin said. “London weather is now our ideal weather.”

Additional contributions from Emma Lewis