One day, shortly before noon, Serhiy Dobrovolsky, a hardware merchant, returned to his home in Kherson, southern Ukraine. He went out to his patio, lit a cigarette and chatted with his neighbor. Suddenly, the sound of a drone began to buzz overhead.
Angela, Serhiy’s wife of 32 years, says she saw her husband run for cover when the drone dropped a grenade. “He died before the ambulance arrived. They told me that he was very unlucky, because a piece of shrapnel pierced his heart,” he says, breaking down.
Serhiy is one of 30 civilians killed in a surge in Russian drone strikes on Kherson since July 1, the city’s military administration told the BBC. They have recorded more than 5,000 drone strikes during the same period, with more than 400 civilians injured.
Drones have changed warfare in Ukraine, and both Ukrainians and Russians use them against military targets.
But the BBC has heard eyewitness accounts and seen credible evidence suggesting Russia is also using drones against civilians in the frontline city of Kherson.
“They can see who they are killing,” Angela says. “Is this how they want to fight, just by bombing people walking in the streets?”
If Russia is found to be intentionally targeting civilians, it would be a war crime.
The Russian military did not respond to BBC questions about these allegations.
Since its large-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia has consistently denied deliberately targeting civilians.
The videos
Evidence of apparent drone attacks on civilians can be seen in numerous videos shared across Ukrainian and Russian social media, six of which were examined by BBC Verify.
In each video, we watch through the remote operator’s camera as he follows the movements of a pedestrian or motorist in civilian clothes, often throwing grenades that sometimes appear to seriously injure or kill their target..
BBC Verify was also able to identify a Telegram channel that has the first public copies seen so far of five of the six videos analyzed.
All of them were published with provocations and threats to the Ukrainian public, including claims that all vehicles were legitimate targets and that people should minimize their movements in public.
Injured people were also insulted, called “pigs,” or, in one case, mocked for being women.
The account that posted some of these drone videos also posted images of drones in boxes and without boxes, and other images of equipment, and thanked people for their donations.
Constant threat
Kherson’s military administration told the BBC that Russia has changed the type of drones it is using and that the city’s electronic systems can no longer intercept most of them.
“You feel like you are constantly being followed, like someone is watching you all the time and could drop explosives at any moment. It’s the worst”says Kristina Synia, who works at a help center just 1 km from the Dnipro River.
To get to the center without being followed by drones, we drive at high speed, take shelter in the trees while we park, and then quickly head inside.
On a shelf behind Kristina, a small device confirms the threat outside: it buzzes whenever it detects a drone. It rang every few minutes while we were there, often detecting the presence of at least four drones.
The trauma is visible on the faces of the residents we meet, who have dared to leave their homes just to stock up on food. Valentyna Mykolaivna wipes her eyes: “We are in a horrible situation. When we go outside, we move from tree to tree, seeking shelter. Every day they attack public buses, every day they drop bombs on us with drones,” he says.
Olena Kryvchun says she was almost attacked by a drone against her car. Minutes before she had to get back into her car after visiting a friend, a bomb fell through the roof above the driver’s seat, shattering the side of the vehicle.
“If he had been in my car, he would have died. Do I look like a soldier? “Does my car look like a military car?” he says. She works as a cleaner and the car was essential for her work. He doesn’t have money to fix it.
Olena says drones are scarier than bombings. “When we hear a projectile launch from the other side of the river, we have time to react. With drones, it’s easy to miss their sound. “They are fast, they see you and attack you.”
Ben Dusing, who runs the aid center, says drones produce even more fear than bombings, immobilizing the population. “If a drone points at you, the truth is that at that moment it is probably game over. There is no defense against it,” he says.
In recent months, says Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, spokesman for the Kherson military administration, the Russian military has also begun using drones to remotely drop mines along pedestrian, car and bus routes.
According to Olena, the explosions were caused by butterfly mines (small anti-personnel mines that can slide to the ground and detonate later upon contact) that are covered in leaves for camouflage.
The BBC has not been able to verify the use of drones to distribute mines in Kherson.
Olena says that as winter approaches, the fear of drones will increase. “When the leaves fall from the trees, there will be many more victims. Because if you are on the street, there is nowhere to hide.”
How we verify drone videos
We were able to locate the six videos we analyzed – all of them recorded in the eastern area of Kherson – identifying distinctive features on the city’s streets.
In one case (in which a drone dropped an explosive on two pedestrians, injuring one of them so badly that he could not walk), it involved a sidewalk at a T-junction, which pointed to the Dniprovs’kyi district or to the nearby suburb of Antonivka, instead of the city center of Kherson.
Once we identified a possible location, we were able to match landmarks visible in the video with satellite images (in this case, the buildings and pylons) that confirmed where in the city the attack occurred.
To try to establish where the videos had first appeared publicly, we ran several frames of each of them through search engines. Often the first result was a particular Telegram channel.
By knowing the location of each attack, we were able to estimate the timing of filming using shadows and cross-reference it with weather records to find the most likely date.
Four of the videos we examined were posted on the Telegram channel the day after probable filming, and in one case it was posted eight hours later on the same day.
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