The use of drones to kill and wound civilians in Kherson is “systemic and widespread”, a UN-backed commission has warned
Anastasiia Pavlenko was attacked twice. The first time, she managed to hide from the drone under a bridge. The second, she was cycling to the centre of Kherson to run some errands when she realised a drone was following her.
“I kept steering right, then left, then right, then left,” she says. “Then I realized that there was a ditch to my right so I couldn’t ride there anymore.” As she steered left again, the drone climbed, hovered in place and dropped its explosives. Wounded in her leg, abdomen and neck, Pavlenko, a 23-year-old mother of two, can now move only in a wheelchair or on crutches.
Hunted by Russian drone operators on the east bank of the Dnipro River, about 150 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and hundreds more injured in a so-called “red zone” covering 45 square kilometres along the west bank, according to a report by the UN-backed Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine.
The drone operators record videos of the attacks, spread later via Russian Telegram channels which the commission says are evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Olga Chernyshova, 38, was attacked in the street along with a man and his wife in a wheelchair. “We ran quickly for a block – me and him with the wheelchair – to some bushes, to a tree to hide, but it was following us,” she says "It was clear it was hunting and watching where we were.” They survived. Others are less fortunate, among them staff and patients at a local cancer hospital in Kherson’s Antonivka district which has become a regular target.
"If it’s a reconnaissance drone, it buzzes like a bee. When it’s loaded, it squeaks, and we hide wherever we can"
Irina Sokur, the hospital’s director, recalls an attack on a colleague’s car last November “so powerful that it tore her body into several pieces”. The next month it became impossible to work, and the hospital had to relocate with all its patients.
"We can run, but they can’t," says Svitlana Budyukh, 43, a local caretaker, who brings food, clothing, and medicine to pensioners and people with disabilities in her neighbourhood. “We don’t have soldiers here; we have civilians. They (the Russians) hate us because we don’t support them.”
Budyukh distinguishes drone types by the sound of their engines. "If it’s a reconnaissance drone, it buzzes like a bee. When it’s loaded, it squeaks, and we hide wherever we can".
Witnesses and survivors interviewed for The Observer corroborate many of the findings of the commission, whose report includes descriptions of 18 attacks as a “small sample” of those investigated. In one, a 67-year-old man is killed by a drone 100 metres from his home, his body left “face down with a hole [in] his head” until it could be recovered after dark. In others, drones attack buses, taxis and private cars.
“These are Russian cadets just playing with drones like toys”
First-person view (FPV) drones, whose operators see exactly where the drone hits up to the last second, have become widely used for attacks on civilians over the past year throughout the Ukrainian war zone anywhere up to 20 kilometres from Russian positions, including in Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Sumy, Yuriy Belousov of the Ukrainian prosecutor-general’s office says. But in Kherson their use is “systematic and widespread”.
The commission’s accounts of direct attacks against civilians amount to “a grave and serious allegation”, and a criminal court or tribunal would want to prove that specific individuals committed these crimes “beyond a reasonable doubt”, Professor Janina Dill of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict says.
The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction for crimes committed on Ukrainian territory, and has already issued an arrest warrant for President Putin. Ukrainian military prosecutors have said they will try to bring senior Russian military and political leaders to justice at the ICC or at a special tribunal akin to those set up to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
More than 170 convictions for war crimes have been handed down in Ukrainian courts already after trials in absentia, but “it is only a matter of time before these individuals fall into the hands of law enforcement or our military”, Belousov says. Some Russian soldiers captured by the Ukrainian military in Kherson were later found guilty of crimes committed in Bucha and sentenced.
Meanwhile, the situation in the red zone only gets worse. Anastasiya Pavlenko follows Russian Telegram channels with footage of drones dropping explosives on people. “These are Russian cadets just playing with drones like toys,” she says. “They don’t care what they do. I don’t know, they get pleasure from it.”
The Kremlin and the Russian embassy in London were approached but declined to comment.
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Interviews with local civilians from the Kherson region were collected as part of The Reckoning Project.
Photograph by Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images
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