In the Ukrainian town of Kherson, a street trader selling vegetables was targeted, tracked, and then hit by a drone, as ITV News’ Vincent McAviney reports
Ukraine has accused Russia of committing a war crime after new footage released by police showed a drone chasing and attacking a street vendor in the southern city of Kherson.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy shared the video, released by police in Kherson, a frontline city just a few miles from the frontline, on Tuesday. It shows the man selling vegetables scrambling to escape as a drone circles overhead and tracks him before detonating after he dives for cover.
The man, later identified as 52-year-old Yuriy by the city’s governor Oleksandr Prokudin, suffered wounds to his back, legs and arms.
“The world must see this,” Zelenskyy said. “It must see every piece of evidence that Russia has gone mad and that its soldiers take pleasure in killing and abusing civilians.”
The Ukrainian president said the Russian drone deliberately “hunted down” the man, adding that “every single day, ordinary people in Kherson face these Russian ‘safaris’.”
Yuriy, a vegetable vendor from the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine, told the Associated Press the ordeal was “terrifying”.
“My wife started running away, and it (drone) started turning around over the car. I showed him that ‘look, it’s vegetables’. But it started coming at me, ” he recalled.
“And I was trying to get away while showing – I have nothing here. The wife got away, and she started screaming, ‘Yura, run!’ But where would I run? There’s steppe all around, there’s nowhere to go. To the bomb shelter? Didn’t even have time to think it over, honestly. Terrifying, it really was.”
Russia’s Defence Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment by AP, ITV News’ US Partner.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said the video showed a “barbaric war crime”.
“This is a deliberate and systemic Russian strategy. They know exactly what they are doing. The sadist operating this drone knows full well that he is targeting a civilian,” he wrote on X.
Kherson’s regional mayor, Oleksandr Prokudin, posted a clip of Yuriy speaking from a hospital bed following the attack.
Prokudin wrote on X: “For nearly a minute, a drone chased the man as he tried to escape. Russians clearly saw whom they were attacking, yet still directed the munition at him.”
Drone attacks on civilians have surged since the war began, with 967 people killed, including ten children, and nearly 7,000 people injured, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said Tuesday.
The deployment of remotely-operated drones, sometimes called “human safari”, has often been used to track and strike civilians going about daily activities, according to previous AP reporting.
A UN commission concluded in October 2025 that such attacks amounted to crimes against humanity.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and denies targeting civilians.
Follow STV News on WhatsApp
Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
