Drone pilots hunt down Ukrainian civilians 'like playing a computer game'

To be on Kherson’s streets is to risk death from above, writes Sam Kiley, while even the hospitals are forced underground

- Sam Kiley

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.