Russia aims drone attacks at civilians, a war crime, UN inquiry says
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 16 hours ago
- 3 min read
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
A United Nations human rights commission has documented hundreds of instances of Russian drone pilots targeting civilians in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, and concluded that they amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes.
For more than a year, Russian operators have routinely flown drones into Kherson and dropped hand grenades on civilians on sidewalks or working in backyard gardens, according to a report released Monday by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. Other attacks hit ambulances and fire brigades, with drones sometimes hovering over burning buildings, waiting to drop grenades on arriving firefighters.
What appear, in isolation, to be random acts of cruelty, according to the commission’s report, were actually an intentional pattern of attacks, intended to create “a permanent climate of terror” and force residents out of Kherson. Ukrainians call such hunting of civilians a “drone safari.”
“These attacks were committed as part of a coordinated policy to drive out civilians from those territories and amount to the crime against humanity of forcible transfer of population,” the report concluded.
Russia has denied targeting civilians but declined to cooperate with investigators who had also sought to investigate Ukrainian strikes in Russian-occupied territory on the other side of the front line.
As drones have come to play a larger role in warfare, so too have they come to play a larger role in war crimes, the report showed.
Russian military units often release videos of drone-eye views of civilians being killed, to be posted online by the units or groups affiliated with the Russian army, apparently as a means of amplifying the threat.
“The city will be dismantled — brick after brick,” one post by a military-affiliated group boasted in May, according to the report. “Stay tuned for updates,” it said.
The U.N. report is among the most comprehensive to date on Russian drone attacks on civilians in Kherson and other front-line areas in southern Ukraine. Citing local authorities, it estimated that Russian drones have killed more than 200 civilians and wounded 2,000 others over the past year. Investigators interviewed 226 people, including victims and first responders, and reviewed more than 500 videos.
The attacks the inquiry covered used small front-line drones, typically with a range of 6 miles, not the larger, longer-range drones that Russia routinely uses to bombard Ukrainian cities that are farther from the battlefield. Some front-line drones hover and drop grenades, while others fly into targets and explode. The attacks in Kherson are so frequent that the city has erected miles of net canopies over its streets to block drones.
Russian forces overran Kherson, on the west bank of the lower Dnieper River, in their initial invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine reclaimed the city in a counteroffensive later that year, but Russian forces kept control over the river’s east bank, within easy drone range. That section of the front line has barely shifted in the past three years.
A paradox of drone weapons lies in their use of remotely viewed video for targeting: They remove the operator from the battlefield, while at the same time providing an intimate view of the violence. It was a factor the U.N. investigators cited in alleging war crimes.
“All the types of short-range drones used in these attacks are equipped with livestreaming cameras that focus on particular targets, leaving no doubt about the knowledge and intent of the perpetrators,” the report said.