Zelenskyy says drone video shows human safari in Kherson

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has released video he said shows a Russian drone chasing and attacking a civilian vegetable vendor in Kherson, calling the strike part of a “human safari” against people living near the front line.

“The world must see this,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram, saying the footage showed “every piece of evidence that Russia has gone mad” and that Russian soldiers were “enjoying killings and tormenting people.”

The video shows a drone hovering above a man on a city street, pursuing him as he tries to move away and then runs around a white van. The drone eventually dives toward him and explodes on impact. Zelenskyy said the drone was carrying explosives and detonated “right next to him.”

The man survived. In a video posted by Kherson regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin, a doctor said he suffered shrapnel wounds to the torso, legs and arms, along with a concussion and trauma.

The vendor was identified as Yuriy, a 52-year-old street vegetable seller. Speaking from a hospital bed, he said he and his wife had begun laying out crates of produce beside his van when he heard the distinctive buzzing of a drone overhead. After his wife ran away, he said, the drone turned toward him.

“I was showing it, saying, ‘Look, vegetables.’ But it started coming straight at me,” Yuriy said, according to video shared by Prokudin. “I started running, it hit the vehicle and I was right next to it.”

In another account reported by the BBC, Yuriy said he held up heads of garlic toward the drone’s camera to show the operator he was a civilian vendor. “It could see that I had tomatoes out, some cucumbers and eggplants laid out on the floor,” he said. “It even ducked under the umbrella when I was running away round the other side.”

Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called the attack a “barbaric war crime” and said such drone attacks were a “deliberate and systemic Russian strategy.” He said the person operating the drone “knows full well that he is targeting a civilian” and called for international condemnation.

BBC Verify said it geolocated the footage to a market space beside a roundabout in the Tavriiskyi district of northern Kherson. The BBC reported that it was not clear who filmed the attack or how, and that the earliest public copy it found was shared Tuesday morning by a pro-Ukrainian Instagram account.

Kherson, in southern Ukraine, sits only a few miles from the front line. The BBC reported that so-called “safari” attacks have long been carried out by Russian troops in the area. A 2025 United Nations report said Russian armed forces had “recurrently killed and injured civilians” there by using drones to target them. The UN also said that posting videos of civilians being killed and injured “amounts to the war crime of outrages upon personal dignity.”

Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, denies targeting civilians.

The video circulated as Ukrainian authorities reported another deadly Russian assault elsewhere in the country. An overnight missile and drone barrage on Kyiv and the surrounding region killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens, officials said Wednesday. Kyiv’s military administration said residential buildings and warehouses were hit.

“Kyiv region experienced one of its most tragic enemy attacks yet again tonight,” Tymur Tkachenko, head of the regional military administration, wrote on Telegram. “Russia has once again brought death and destruction to our land, taking the lives of civilians. Just accountability will certainly follow for every such crime.”