Viktor Hordiyenko recently saw two years of hard work literally going up in flames, when Russian forces attacked his fields with incendiary bombs.It was yet another huge blow to Hordiyenko, a farmer in Ukraine’s Kherson region who last year lost his father in a Russian drone strike -- and this year has endured what he says is a massively upscaled Russian campaign to pound his country’s vital agricultural sector.“A hundred a day. This is not an exaggeration. A hundred drones a day. Shelling every day. They’re hunting us. They burnt 2,000 hectares of my wheat in a single night,” he told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service.
“Winter wheat, all the crops you see, have been scorched,” he said, adding that drone attacks were now -- at harvest time -- three times higher than a few months ago.'Increasing Terror'The regional military administration said that in June, Russian forces dug in on the opposite bank of the Dnieper River fired some 32,000 shells. This was a 26 percent increase on March, and a 13 percent increase on numbers from April and May.It also noted a rise in drone strikes, with an average 5,500 launches per week compared to 2,500 last year. There were 28 civilian deaths in June, a 78 percent increase on March.“The security situation in the Kherson region continues to deteriorate,” said Oleksandr Tolonnikov, deputy head of the administration. “Russia is not reducing the intensity of strikes, but, on the contrary, is systematically increasing terror against civilian residents.”
