Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has shared footage that he said shows a remotely operated Russian drone pursuing a civilian street vendor in the southern Kherson region before exploding near him.
The video shows a man moving away from a drone hovering above a street before it follows him as he runs around a white van. The drone then descends and detonates on impact, according to the footage described in the report.
A doctor said the man survived with multiple shrapnel wounds, concussion and trauma. Kherson’s regional governor later released a hospital video identifying him as Yuriy, a 52-year-old vegetable vendor.
Vendor describes attack
Yuriy said he and his wife had begun arranging crates of vegetables beside their van when he heard a buzzing sound overhead. He said his wife ran away and the drone then turned towards him.
He said he held up heads of garlic towards the drone’s camera to indicate that he was not filming it. Yuriy said the operator could see tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplants laid out for sale, and that the drone appeared to follow him as he ran around the vehicle.
BBC Verify geolocated the footage to a market area next to a roundabout in the Tavriiskyi district of northern Kherson. It was not clear who recorded the attack or how it was filmed. The earliest publicly available copy found by BBC Verify had been posted by a pro-Ukrainian Instagram account on Tuesday morning.
Ukrainian officials call for condemnation
Zelensky described the incident as a Russian “safari” attack against civilians and said the world should see evidence of what he called killings and tormenting of people by Russian soldiers.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the footage a “barbaric war crime” and said the use of drones against civilians was a deliberate and systematic Russian strategy. He said the drone operator knew that the target was a civilian and called for international condemnation.
The term “human safari” has been used to describe drone attacks on civilians in frontline areas. Kherson is only a few miles from the front line, and a 2025 UN report said it had found that Russian armed forces had repeatedly killed and injured civilians in the area through drone strikes.
The UN report also said that sharing drone videos showing civilians being killed or injured could amount to the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity. The source report did not include a response from Russia to the latest allegations.
Source: BBC News
