Human safari: Drone chases vegetable seller in Kherson attack

A 52-year-old vegetable seller in Kherson has survived a Russian drone attack after the device chased him around his van, detonating just metres away and leaving him with shrapnel wounds and a concussion. The incident, captured on video and shared widely, has been branded a “human safari” by Ukrainian officials, who say Russian operators are deliberately hunting civilians for sport.

‘He deliberately hunted him’

The footage shows the man, identified by Ukrainian media as Yurii, trying to hide from a first-person-view drone as it hovers around his vehicle. In a statement released by local military officials, Yurii said he tried to signal that he was only selling vegetables, “but it started flying right at me.” His wife managed to escape, he added.

President Zelensky called the attack a crime, saying the drone “deliberately hunted down” the man and detonated next to him. “Every single day, ordinary people in Kherson face these Russian ‘safaris’,” he said.

Kherson’s daily drone terror

Kherson, which lies across the Dnipro River from Russian positions, has been subjected to hundreds of drone strikes on civilians over the past year. Local authorities have installed netting and barriers, and many essential services have moved underground to escape the relentless attacks. The phenomenon has become so common that Ukrainians coined the term “human safari” to describe Russian operators who use the drones’ cameras to identify and chase down individual people.

Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha condemned the attack as a “barbaric” war crime, adding that thousands of similar incidents never receive public attention. “This is a deliberate and systemic Russian strategy,” he said. “The sadist operating this drone knows full well that he is targeting a civilian.”

Drone ‘kill zone’ expands

Ukrainian military officials say advances in drone speed and range have extended the danger zone to about 25 kilometres on either side of the front line—wide enough to encompass entire cities like Kherson. According to a New York Times report in January, local officials said roughly 200 civilians had been killed and 2,000 wounded in drone strikes over the previous year.

The threat has become so severe that Ukrainian soldiers are hacking into the video feeds of Russian FPV drones to spot and destroy them before they strike. A soldier operating drone-detection equipment told The Telegraph that on a busy day they might shoot down ten drones.

The fear extends well beyond Kherson. Anastasiia Bilchenko, a Ukrainian aid worker, recently recounted a narrow escape from an FPV drone near Kharkiv. “There was an FPV drone just flying after our car, and I was terrified,” she said. “We could see, from our drone detector, that the eyes of the drone were following us.”

Black Sea beach tragedy

The Kherson attack came a day after video circulated showing a Ukrainian drone falling on a crowded beach at the Russian Black Sea resort of Gelendzhik. Russian officials said seven people died, including three children, and 58 were injured. This incident underscored how drone warfare is increasingly reaching civilian spaces on both sides of the conflict.

Deliberate targeting or collateral damage?

While Ukraine’s government characterized the beach incident as a tragic accident, the Kherson video offers a stark contrast: a drone operator actively pursuing a lone civilian. International law prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians, and evidence of such tactics could strengthen war crimes cases against Russia. The global outrage over the video may also pressure allies to accelerate the delivery of air-defense systems capable of countering small drones, which have become one of the deadliest threats on the modern battlefield.