Drone attacks on civilians reveal Russia’s new terror tactics in Ukraine

Just before noon one day, hardware trader Serhiy Dobrovolsky returned home to Kherson in southern Ukraine. He walked into the yard, lit a cigarette, and chatted with his next-door neighbor. Suddenly, they heard a drone buzzing overhead.

Angela, Serhi’s wife of 32 years, said she saw her husband run away and hide when a drone dropped a grenade. “He died before the ambulance arrived. I was told he was very unfortunate because a piece of shrapnel pierced his heart,” she said, breaking down.

Kherson’s military administration told the BBC that Serhi was one of 30 civilians killed in a sudden surge in Russian drone attacks in Kherson since July 1. They documented more than 5,000 drone strikes during the same period, injuring more than 400 civilians.

Drones have transformed warfare in Ukraine, with both Ukraine and Russia using them to attack military targets.

But 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 can see who they are killing,” Angela said. “Is this how they want to fight, just bombing people walking down the street?”

If Russia was found to have deliberately targeted civilians, it would constitute a war crime.

The Russian military did not respond to the BBC’s questions about the allegations. Since its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has denied deliberately targeting civilians.

Clear evidence of drone attacks on civilians can be seen in a large number of videos shared on Ukrainian and Russian social media, six of which were reviewed by BBC Verify.

In each video, we see through the camera of a remote operator as they track the movements of pedestrians or motorists in civilian clothes, often dropping grenades that sometimes appear to seriously injure or kill their targets.

BBC verify was also able to identify a Telegram channel that had the earliest public copies to date of five of the six films analyzed.

Each of them provoked and threatened the Ukrainian public, including claiming that all vehicles were legitimate targets and that people should minimize public activity. The injured man was also insulted, called a “pig” and at one point was mocked for being a woman.

The account posted a number of drone videos, as well as images of boxed and unboxed drones and other equipment, thanking people for their donations.

The military junta in Kherson told the BBC that Russia had changed the types of drones it used and that the city’s electronic systems could no longer intercept most of them.

“You feel like you are being hunted all the time, like someone is always watching you and could drop explosives at any moment. It’s the worst thing,” said Kristina, who works at an aid center just 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) from the Dnieper River. Kristina Synia said.

To get to the city center without being tracked by drones, we drove at high speeds, used trees for cover when parking, and quickly headed indoors.

On a shelf behind Christina, there’s a small device that identifies threats outside—it buzzes every time a drone is detected. It buzzed every few minutes while we were there – often detecting the presence of at least four drones.

The faces of the residents we met were filled with trauma as they bravely walked out of their homes just to stock up on food. Valentina Nikolaevna wiped her eyes, “We were in a bad situation. When we came out, we moved from tree to tree, looking for cover. Every day they attack the bus, every day Use drones to drop bombs on us,” she said.

Olena Kryvchun said the drone struck her car and nearly hit her. Minutes before she returned to her car after visiting friends, a bomb fell from the roof above the driver’s seat, tearing off the side of the vehicle and leaving a mess of metal, plastic and glass.

“If I had been in the car, I would have died. Do I look like a soldier?” she said. She was a janitor and the car was vital to her job. She had no money to repair it.

Olena said the drones were more terrifying than the shelling. “When we hear shells being fired across the river, we have time to react. With drones, you can easily miss their sound. They are fast and will attack when they see you.

Ben Dusing, director of the aid center, said drones spread fear more than shelling and disable people. “If a drone locks onto you, the reality is, it’s probably ‘game over’ at that point. There’s no defense against that,” he said.

In the past few months, the Russian military has also begun using drones to drop landmines along the far ends of sidewalks, car lanes and bus lanes, said Alexander Prokukin, a spokesman for the Kherson Military Administration.

He said the explosion was caused by butterfly mines, which are small anti-personnel mines that slide to the ground and explode on contact and are covered with leaves for camouflage.

The BBC has not been able to verify Kherson’s use of drones to lay mines.

Olena said fear of drones will intensify as winter approaches. “When the leaves fall from the trees, there are going to be more victims. Because if you’re on the street, there’s nowhere to hide.

By identifying salient features of city streets, we were able to locate the six videos we analyzed, all shot on the east side of Kherson. In one case, a drone dropped an explosive on two pedestrians, one of whom was seriously injured and unable to walk, at a T-junction leading to the Dniprovsk district or the nearby suburb of Antonivka , instead of the center of Kherson.

Once a possible location was identified, we were able to match visible landmarks in the footage with satellite imagery (in this case, buildings and towers) to confirm where in the city the attack occurred.

To try to determine where these videos first appeared publicly, we ran a few frames of each video through the search engine. Often the earliest results are from a specific Telegram channel, several hours older than the retweet date on sites like X or Reddit.

With the location of each attack, we were able to use shadows to calculate the time of shooting and cross-reference weather records to find the most likely date.

Four of the videos we examined were posted on Telegram channels the day after they were likely filmed, and in one case, eight hours later on the same day.

Additional reporting by Imogen Anderson, Anastasia Levchenko and Vladimir Lozhko. Richard Owen-Brown’s verification work