Hunted in Kherson What Russia’s deliberate drone attacks on Ukrainian civilians say about the future of war crimes
After Russian forces seized the city of Kherson in March 2022, occupation authorities put up billboards that said, “Russia is here forever.” Eight months later, in November 2022, the Ukrainian military liberated the city, driving Russian troops back across the Dnipro River. To this day, the river marks the front line in the region. And the Russian forces on the other side are still finding ways to terrorize Kherson’s population.
In a recent report, Human Rights Watch documented Russia using drones to target civilians in Kherson, noting that “apparently deliberate or reckless attacks that constitute war crimes” killed dozens of civilians and injured hundreds more in 2024. Based on testimony from survivors and witnesses, as well as dozens of videos and photographs, HRW determined that Russian forces are carrying out these attacks using commercially available drones rigged with explosive weapons, including antipersonnel landmines. Much of the evidence included footage recorded by the perpetrators themselves and uploaded to Russian military-affiliated Telegram channels.
The campaign of attacks, which has ramped up significantly since last spring, has forced thousands of Kherson residents from their homes, resulting in the depopulation of the city’s Dniprovskyi district and the adjacent suburb of Antonivka. According to the Kherson City Council Executive Committee, Antonivka’s population decreased from 4,570 to 2,300 residents between May and December 2024. Local officials did not provide statistics on the population decline in the Dniprovskyi district.
In another report released last week, the U.N. Human Rights Office said that over the past year, short-range drones have emerged as the leading cause of civilian casualties in Ukraine. U.N. monitors verified more than 3,000 civilian injuries and deaths from drone attacks since Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022. And while the vast majority (89 percent) occurred as a result of Russian attacks on Ukrainian government-controlled areas, 62 percent occurred in the Kherson region.
For more insight into how drone warfare impacts Kherson’s civilians and facilitates Russian war crimes in Ukraine, The Beet editor Eilish Hart spoke to Belkis Wille, an associate director in the Crisis, Conflict, and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch.
The following Q&A has been lightly edited and abridged for length and clarity.
— What was Human Rights Watch’s methodology for investigating these drone attacks? How do you identify patterns of targeting civilians?
— Our methodology for documentation is really the same for all kinds of attacks. We always want to base our information on direct testimony from the victims and witnesses — that’s the most important [thing]. When we can actually physically get to the area that’s under attack, that’s really important for us as well, because it allows us to really understand the dynamics, potentially see the remnants of the attacks, and perhaps most importantly, identify whether there are relevant military targets in the area. That’s why in November [2024] we went down to Kherson despite the fact that attacks were ongoing.
For this report, we had an additional piece, which was these videos that were being posted [online] — broadly speaking, we call that “perpetrator content.” In the last 10 years or so, perpetrator content has become more and more of a crucial piece of potential investigations into things like war crimes and crimes against humanity. And that’s really come about with the proliferation of people using smartphones and posting videos online. Remarkably, a lot of perpetrators don’t seem to have any concerns about documenting and posting themselves committing war crimes.
But of course, we can only use that kind of content if we know that it’s real, and so we have a process in place. When we come across content that looks like it’s relevant to an investigation, my colleagues from our open-source investigator team see if they can verify it, and it’s only once they’ve been able to verify it that I even engage with it as part of the evidence base for the attacks that we’re looking at.
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Once we’ve done all of that, we gather all our findings together and then we write to whichever perpetrator it is that we’re naming and to other relevant [people] who might have more information. In this case, that meant engaging with the Kherson local authorities — the police, the local administration etc. — who are keeping their own statistics.
The development of patterns really comes from the scale of the research. For this report, the aim was not to look at one or two individual attacks, but to look at the full scale of attacks that we saw over the six months. That was really the only way that we would be able to start to see if there were any patterns to the attacks. And that’s ultimately what we were able to draw out of the data.
— What did your six-month investigation reveal about Russian drone attacks in Kherson? How severe has the impact been on civilians?
— What we saw is that from June to December of last year, there was really this mass increase in attacks being carried out by drone-delivered munitions. Of course, Kherson has been under attack since November 2022, when the Russian forces pulled out and then moved south of the river. So attacks coming into the city are nothing new. But that these attacks are primarily being carried out by drone — that is new.
We did a deep dive into 45 attacks where we were able to get the information we needed to be confident that these were clearly attacks on civilians and civilian objects. And what we saw was that with these drones, Russian soldiers are really carrying out a wholesale campaign to target all aspects of civilian life in two particular areas of Kherson that are along the riverbank, [the Dniprovskyi district and the adjacent suburb of Antonivka]. And in so doing, not only are they terrorizing the civilian population, but they’re essentially triggering mass depopulation from these two areas.
We saw that the range of things coming under attack was everything one needs for basic civilian life: shops, delivery vans, hospitals, ambulances, emergency teams, fire trucks, generators, people in their cars, people on bicycles, people walking — really every aspect of civilian life.
— The report says that Russian forces appear to be “deliberately or recklessly” carrying out drone strikes against civilians and civilian objects. How should we understand the difference between a deliberate strike and a reckless one?
— In this case, when we’re talking specifically about drones, deliberate means that the operator sees a civilian, identifies this [person] as a civilian, and decides to carry out the attack knowing that this is a civilian. Reckless would be where they see someone they think might be military, but they’re not taking the measures needed to either verify that they’re military or to meet their obligation under international humanitarian law, which is to presume that someone is civilian unless you have evidence to counter that.
— Can you provide a specific example of what appeared to be a deliberate attack on a civilian in Kherson?
— The case of Anastasia [Pavlenko] that we start the report with in the summary is a good [example]. You have a woman who’s on a bicycle, and to the drone operator, it would be absolutely clear that she is wearing civilian clothing, is not carrying anything that looks like a weapon, and is just slowly biking along the road. What we saw was that a drone identifies her, follows her for several hundred meters, and only then decides to drop this munition. She gets very seriously injured but luckily survives and is able to make it under a bridge. I think that’s one of the reasons she’s alive.
That’s also a very good example of the impacts of all of this because [Anastasia] left Kherson and she hasn’t been back since. This clearly shows that the impact of these attacks is that people leave and they don't come back. Anecdotally, we had residents telling us things like, “In my neighborhood, there were thousands of people in June [2024], and now there are tens of people left.”
— Your report confirms Russia is using commercial drones for these attacks. How are these drones modified into weapons?
— It’s very unsophisticated. All they’re doing essentially is creating a mechanism that can carry and then drop an object, sometimes with 3D printers or with other parts that you could buy in any DIY store. And in this case, they’re dropping various types of munitions.
As far as we can tell, they’re doing this at a very local level. It’s not like the Russian military is buying and modifying these drones in a centralized fashion and then sending them out to individual units. Instead, it seems to be that supporters or fundraisers are sending small numbers of drones to these individual units, and then they’re modifying them to rig them up to drop things.
— You traced these drones to two Chinese manufacturers and a Russian “volunteer organization.” How did they respond when confronted with your findings?
— The Russian entity never responded but the Chinese companies both sent us fairly detailed responses. They gave a long list of steps that they have taken to try to enforce their own terms of service, which prohibit their drones from being used in combat operations. They mentioned things like using geofencing technology, essentially stopping sales in Ukraine and Russia, and vetting customers.
I would say that despite this laundry list, we haven’t seen the presence of these drones diminish on either side of the conflict. So that would beg the question of the extent to which these measures are meaningful or are meant to be meaningful.
A potential alternative [explanation] is simply that there isn’t much that companies can do to control end-use given that anyone can buy their product on Amazon, Alibaba, or in any electronics store. One can fly [these drones] and render them into munition-dropping instruments very easily. All of this is quite easy to do, so potentially there isn’t really much more that the companies could do that would be effective.
— Why has Kherson been singled out for this intensive drone campaign?
I think this huge number of incidents in Kherson speaks to the fact that there seems to be something specific going on there. The residents with whom we spoke felt that the Russian military has a very particular objective when it comes to Kherson, which is to depopulate the areas along the riverbank in order to either create a more permanent buffer zone or to try and create a bridgehead to cross back over the river and take the city. Of course, we can’t know whether it’s the one or the other or something else going on. But that’s how locals interpret why this is happening in these particular neighborhoods.
We did a really detailed search of every statement about operations in Kherson coming from Moscow, from the military and the government, but we couldn’t find any that gave any sense of [Russia’s objectives].
— In what way do attacks like these violate international humanitarian law?
— It’s important to say that we, as an organization, are not anti-drone in the context of military operations. When drones are being used to carry out highly precise attacks on military objects, and therefore minimizing harm to civilians, there is no legal issue with that.
The issue is when what are essentially delivery mechanisms that allow for highly precise attacks are being used to target civilians deliberately. I’ll say it very explicitly: the deliberate targeting of civilians is a serious violation of international humanitarian law and those who commit that violation with criminal intent or negligence can be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But I think the important thing that we’re watching in [terms of] this trend — where you see so many more civilians being injured and killed by drones today than there were a year ago in Ukraine — is the fact that historically, high-precision attacks were extremely expensive to carry out. You would need an expensive [high-precision] munition, highly trained staff, and space from which to fire that munition. And so warring parties, generally speaking, would use high-precision munitions only to target high-value military targets, because these were not expendable munitions.
What we now have here is really a shift where a warring party can carry out a highly precise attack extremely cheaply, and that’s what’s new in this dynamic. That’s why so many militaries and other armed groups are now very interested in using drones: because it’s cheap and easy and allows for precision attacks. And so when those attacks are actually aimed at breaking international humanitarian law and targeting civilians, that is particularly dangerous because it is so easy for a warring party to do.
Interview by Eilish Hart