KHERSON, Ukraine — A 52-year-old vegetable seller from the Mykolaiv region has described how a Russian first-person-view (FPV) drone pursued him around his market van before detonating beside him, in an attack that Ukrainian authorities have logged as a suspected war crime.
The incident, captured on National Police CCTV, unfolded at a farmers' market in Kherson. Yuriy, who asked to be identified only by his first name, said the day began like any other. He and his wife drove in to set up their stall, parking their van at the market.
“We had just started laying out the vegetables. I had only set up the umbrellas and begun taking the crates out. My wife was there too,” he said from his hospital bed.
“We hear a buzzing sound, you can’t see it, it flew out from somewhere behind the market, out of the bushes and flew really low.”
In footage later released by Ukraine’s National Police, a small FPV drone appears over the market and begins shadowing a man in dark clothing as he moves around his white van. The drone dips and changes direction in step with his movements before finally plunging towards him and exploding, leaving him on the ground.
Yuriy says his wife ran as soon as she heard the noise. The drone, he recalls, then seemed to fix on him alone.
“My wife started running away and it began turning around, heading towards the vehicle,” he said. “I was gesturing to it, like ‘look, here are the vegetables’, but it started swooping down at me. I started running, I crashed into the vehicle. It turns out we lined up with it, it struck, and I just fell down. Then I saw that the vehicle was damaged.”
He insists there was nothing in the scene that could reasonably be mistaken for a military target. “I wasn’t filming it, nothing like that. I was actually holding garlic. If you watch the video, I’m holding two heads of garlic. I was showing him: ‘look, it’s all farm stuff’,” he said.
“You saw yourselves in the video that when I was running away from it from that side, it was lowering itself under the umbrella. He could see there were already tomatoes there, some cucumbers, eggplants lying on the ground. So there was nothing there.”
‘Human safari’ tactics
Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said the video “shows Russia’s real tactic: pursuing and killing innocent people.” “The world must watch without looking away. This is how Russia hunts civilians,” he added.
For Yuriy, this was not the first drone attack. “This is already the second time. The first time I was going to my mother-in-law’s. Back then we managed to run away from the drone,” he said. “So we repaired the car like that, because we’ve got nothing else to use for transport, to bring things in or take them out.”
This time he had no way out. When the drone’s munition detonated, the blast ripped through the rear of the van and knocked him off his feet. Police and regional officials say he suffered a concussion, blast trauma and multiple shrapnel wounds to his back and legs but is now in a stable condition.
Ukrainian police and local authorities have stressed that the victim shows “no signs of being a combatant,” describing him simply as a vegetable trader from Mykolaiv region who came to Kherson to sell produce. The attack is being logged as another suspected war crime by Russian forces, and Ukraine’s prosecutors have opened a case.
Officials say the Kherson incident is part of a broader trend: low-flying FPV drones used not just to strike frontline positions but to pursue individual civilians in streets and markets near the southern front. Similar attacks have been reported in recent weeks, including a separate drone strike on a civilian at a Kherson market and drone footage showing another such strike. The pattern has drawn condemnation from European capitals, with Turkey condemning drone strikes on civilian ships in the Black Sea as well.
As the war grinds on, Ukrainian officials argue that such attacks are a deliberate strategy to terrorise the civilian population. For Yuriy, the trauma is personal. “I was just trying to sell vegetables,” he said. “There was nothing military here. Just tomatoes, cucumbers, and garlic.”
