Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has shared a video on social media of a drone hunting down a man in southern Ukraine, saying it showed an instance of a Russian “safari” attack against civilians.
The video shows the drone pursuing a street vendor on a city street in the Kherson region. The man moves away from the drone hovering above, before it chases him as he runs around a white van. Eventually, the drone swoops down on him and explodes on impact.
The man escaped with multiple shrapnel wounds, concussion and trauma, a doctor said.
Sometimes called “human safari”, the deployment of remotely-operated drones against civilians has often been used by Russians to terrify residents of front line areas in Ukraine.
“The world must see this,” Zelensky wrote on Telegram. “It must see every piece of evidence that Russia has gone mad, and every fact that Russian soldiers are enjoying killings and tormenting people.”
The video showed a “barbaric war crime”, said Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.
The safaris were a “deliberate and systemic Russian strategy,” Sybiha said. “The sadist operating this drone knows full well that he is targeting a civilian.”
He added the attack was part of a deliberate Russian campaign to intimidate civilians and demanded international condemnation.
The Kherson regional governor later posted a video showing the man – identified as Yuriy, a 52-year-old street vegetable vendor – speaking from a hospital bed following the drone attack.
Yuriy said he and his wife had started to lay out crates of vegetables next to his van when he heard a distinctive buzzing sound overhead.
When his wife ran away, the drone turned to him instead. He held up some heads of garlic towards the drone’s camera to show the operator that he was not trying to film it.
“It could see that I had tomatoes out, some cucumbers and eggplants laid out on the floor,” Yuriy said. “It even ducked under the umbrella when I was running away round the other side.”
BBC Verify geolocated the video to a market space beside a roundabout in the Tavriiskyi district in northern Kherson. It is not clear who filmed the attack, or how – but the earliest public copy BBC Verify found was shared by a pro-Ukrainian Instagram account on Tuesday morning.
“Safari” attacks have long been carried out by Russian troops in Kherson, which sits only a few miles from the front line.
A 2025 UN report said it had found Russian armed forces “recurrently killed and injured civilians” in the area by using drones to target them.
The videos filmed by the drones before they explode on to their targets are often posted online, allowing thousands to witness the last moments of the terrified victims.
“Posting videos of civilians being killed and injured amounts to the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity,” the UN said.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and denies targeting civilians.
Additional reporting by Richard Irvine-Brown, BBC Verify
