Russian drone pilots hunting down Ukrainian civilians on the streets: ‘Like playing a computer game’
The electronic hum in the sky above told him that the Russians were on a hunting safari and that he was the prey. Leaping from his bicycle, Oleksandr left its wheels spinning as he bolted through a hole in a fence hoping to find cover.
Horrified to discover he was still in the open air, he threw himself against the fence, hoping to blend in, to somehow hide. The drone tracked sideways, hung above him, and dropped its bomb.
The explosion tore a chunk of his leg away.
“He was hovering above me. I had a feeling that he was playing a computer game, dropping bombs on peaceful civilians,” Oleksandr Sensky said from the hospital where he is recovering in Kherson.
As he tore into the medical bag he carried as a Red Cross volunteer in Kherson, he knew he was still being watched by the drone pilots across the Dnipro River, less than a mile away.
As he scrabbled in the dirt fixing a tourniquet on his leg, the thought struck him that maybe they were high-fiving their friends or jeering as he struggled.
Kherson was liberated from Russia in November 2022. Since then it has been shelled, mortared, rocketed, and bombed every day. Now it is also contending with being a target-practice area for Russian drone pilots who post videos of their “hunting trips” onto Telegram.
The use of drones has turned a viciously impersonal mission to kill civilians in this southern Ukrainian city into a darkly personal campaign of murder. If ever there was a town in desperate need of a ceasefire, this is it. But no one here says they believe one is remotely possible.
Russian forces occupy the east bank of the Dnipro, which is about 500m wide in the city. Their snipers and gunners can see targets with the naked eye. Drone pilots can see in live feeds the terrified run and trip, the horror in the eyes, and then the final moments of their victims. They drop bombs or swoop on them with first-person view (FPV) aircraft drones that can loiter out of sight and dart in for the kill.
For three years, Kherson has been frightening. Now its population remains behind closed doors and drawn curtains as deadly drones target buses, trams, cars and shoppers. To be on the street is to risk the hunters’ eyes.
Lives are ended above ground. Underground now, at least, they can begin in safety.
Ukraine has opened the first bespoke bombproof maternity hospital by abandoning the surface facility for its basement. The city has also opened an underground surgical hospital and has plans for seven more. It’s taking every one of its hospitals and, to avoid the Russian killing games, turning them upside down.
Dr Petro Marenkovskyi is head of the new obstetrics department in the old Kherson Maternity Hospital. His medical work is now two floors down in what were cellars. The spotless corridors lead to shining new delivery rooms, an operating theatre, an intensive care unit – all the facilities that were abandoned above ground are protected now by blast-resistant doors, like on a submarine.
The day before The Independent visits, Kherson was hit by nine bombs dropped by Russian jets which killed two people. Another five were injured in drone attacks. As the killing continues, so the urgency to reproduce, as an act of defiance, intensifies.
