KHERSON, SOUTHERN UKRAINE – Oleksandr gave a battle-hardened chuckle as he spoke about the constant threat of Russian drones over his hometown. But moments later, he was fighting back tears."This is our country. This is my home. I have tried…but I can't live without Kherson. That's how it is," he said.The conversation was abruptly interrupted by gunfire, buzzing, and a shouted warning that a Russian Lightning drone was nearby. The RFE/RL Ukrainian Service team joined locals running across broken glass to a shelter.Oleksandr is a resident of Kherson, a city that had some 280,000 inhabitants before Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 but which now has a population of around 60,000.Swiftly occupied by Russian forces, it was liberated months later and has since been repeatedly attacked by shells and drones launched by Russian forces dug in on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River on the edge of the city.
Now, municipal teams work in bulletproof vests under the cover of mobile air defense units. When the all-clear sounded, a team got back to work boarding up blasted windows in a housing block with plywood."Every day you understand that people are taking risks, risking their lives," said Volodymyr Tsiktor, head of the municipal works department. "There was one recent case where a garbage truck was hit. It was pretty obvious that it wasn't a military vehicle, but a drone struck it. Thankfully, everything was OK. The people inside suffered only minor injuries."'Human Safari'Civilians in Kherson are frequently hunted by first-person-view drones, or FPVs, in attacks dubbed a "human safari." This week, video of a Russian drone stalking and attacking a 52-year-old man selling vegetables at a local market made global headlines. The man suffered concussion and shrapnel wounds, but local authorities say Russian FPV drone attacks killed 29 civilians in July alone.Tsiktor said the tactic was "probably to drive people into despair, into panic…. It's terror to force the population to leave."
