Drone Safaris

holy shiat!

The Dystopian Future Dawns in Kherson

Yuri is a 52-year-old Ukrainian who runs a market stall in Kherson, not far from the front line. Yesterday, he was sorting through vegetables when he heard the loud, distinctive buzz of a Russian drone. As he later told the journalist Zarina Zabrisky, he had nothing more than a couple of garlic bulbs in his hands, and no weapons. “Not even a phone.” He gestured at his tomatoes and peppers, so that the drone operator, whoever and wherever he might be, could see that he wasn’t a soldier.

The drone kept following him. Police footage shows it chasing Yuri around his truck. He hides under the umbrella that covers the stand, runs from one side to another, gestures at the vegetables. Then the drone dives beside him and explodes. Miraculously, Yuri survived, with just cuts and a concussion. Zabrisky interviewed him in the hospital, where he was lucid, and surprisingly sane.



Sane might be the key word here, because the experience of being chased by a murderous kamikaze drone, a flying machine that behaves as if it were alive, is not one that humans are equipped to understand. Pre-modern fanatics used to hallucinate flying devils. But few modern civilians have been chased by mechanized flying objects. Unless they live in or around Kherson.

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Since 2024, Russian drones have been conducting human safaris in Kherson and other parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, tracking Ukrainian civilians with the aim of killing them. When I reported in the city in 2023, no one went near the Dnipro River, since the Russians were on the other side. Rapidly changing technology has now put the whole city and surrounding countryside within range of Vladimir Putin’s forces.

A UN inquiry last year documented hundreds of drone attacks on individuals across eastern Ukraine, targeting people walking on sidewalks, working in gardens, driving ambulances, commuting to work. Sometimes drones hang over burning buildings, waiting for fire brigades to appear so that firemen can be murdered too. The motive can only be terror, and perhaps revenge. Russian troops occupied Kherson at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022; Ukrainian forces took the city back seven months later following what remains the most significant counter-offensive of the war.

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