Human Safari in Kherson City
You probably saw the reports last year: drones chasing old ladies and dropping grenades on them. For a while it was big news. Now it's become routine, as every new horror does. The world lets it.
I met seventy-nine-year-old Marina at the home of one of her family members, Nastya. They are both from Kherson city, but while Nastya left early in the war, Marina stayed through the occupation and liberation until December 2024, when the situation became untenable.
And not just generally untenable because missiles are flying around as part of a war between nations. Marina is from one of the eastern suburbs of Kherson city, nearest to the river and thus the most exposed to the Russian-occupied left bank. There, FPV drones, piloted by humans with free will and conscious intent, hunt, taunt and murder civilians, especially elderly people, on a daily basis.
As soon as I asked Marina about her experiences, she got visibly upset, which is hardly surprising. But she was also very keen to tell her story, complaining at once that “very few people” write about “how it really is in Kherson”, and it’s vitally important to do so.
Please tell me what’s going on in Kherson now.
Marina: “According to Prokudin [the Kherson regional governor), the city is protected somehow. That there’s a new system protecting it from drones. Well, I’ve been there a few times since I came here in December, and do you know how we live?
To get to any public transport I have to walk I don’t know how many blocks. Taxis don’t go to the streets closest to the river, or fire engines. No ambulances, no electricians. The only person working there when I was there was the internet guy. I thank him. There’s bombing going on, they’re shooting, and Vania’s up a network pole! “Why would I bother going up and down?” he says.
At the same time, there are a lot of people there. A lot. Recently I read that Russia wants this red zone on the riverbank to be a ‘quiet zone’. And right away people worked out that this means there would be no civilian population left, and anything that moved would be military. That was their original goal.”
Which region of the city is this?
“The whole embankment region is affected, from Stanislav to Beryslav, which has practically been wiped out. My sister lived there and her house was hit several times, the roof was destroyed, the windows blown out.
If you ask for help, people just tell you to leave [the city]. But not everyone has the means to leave. For example, I’m a pensioner, I’m alone now. Come and rent a flat in Mykolaiv? On my pension, that’s just not realistic. I get 3,085 hryvnia a month, the minimum. Luckily Nastya’s here. She came and got me.”
Two and a half years ago, things looked different in Kherson. On 11 November 2022, Ukrainian troops liberated the city after an eight-month occupation.
Marina: “You know, when Kherson was liberated, there was such emotion! It was so unexpected. I can’t remember it without a smile. It was an ordinary day. I was out on the street, talking with my neighbour, and then some guy comes down the street and says, ‘Why are you standing there? The girls are already embracing the soldiers by the Eternal Flame.’
We say, ‘Which of our girls are with soldiers?!’ He says, ‘Yes, I just saw it!’ We’re standing there, like… It’s an occupation. Our girls can’t be embracing soldiers – well, maybe it’s happening somewhere, but not openly. Then a neighbour comes along and says our guys have already arrived. I say, ‘Yura, how?’ There was nothing in the morning. He says, ‘Yes, for sure, I just came from Freedom Square.’
Well, there’s no electricity, no internet. No way of finding anything out. It’s all rumours. And it’s already evening, it’s getting dark. We look out of the window with a torch, and someone’s coming. We’re in a well-insulated house, it’s hard to hear. I tell my husband – he was still alive then – to go out. But we tried not to go out. We were under occupation and everyone was afraid, because they were capable of anything.
He goes out, and some other neighbours have turned up. They’re shouting, ‘Our guys! Our guys! They’re in the city!’ We had a diesel generator that was working, and we turn the TV on, and Kyiv is broadcasting it.
And the next day people were putting tables out in the alley. There was singing and dancing. They put out one table and people brought food. If there was no room, they brought another table. They hung our flags on them.
The next day we were looking for a way to call our children. Rumours said Starlink was available on Freedom Square. We go through the park, and a huge number of people are walking along quietly, dressed in unobtrusive grey clothes, like mice, though they’re smiling. If you went there before and saw a friend, you’d hug and kiss.
We’re going to the square and there’s such a mass of people. There’s parades, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Everyone’s hugging each other, and the soldiers, are just standing there, and we’re crying with them, and kissing them, and taking photos. Such emotions!
And yet people say Kherson is 97% pro-Russia. What are you talking about?!”
What do you think of Trump’s plan to give Kherson [city] to Putin?
I think it’s unrealistic, and it’s unrealistic to think they can storm Kherson, because I can see the river from our yard, and, yes, they try – we often hear machine-gun fire as they try to get past the islands – but the river protects the city. It’s 800 metres wide, a convenient barrier. So in revenge they’re just wiping everything out: along the riverbank there’s no [state] enterprises or anything, it’s just residential buildings, the private sector.
So what are things like in the city now?
“[Russian sources] write, that there are military targets here, but we know what they’re hitting. Houses. Shells hit the same place twice, then three times, and there’s nothing left. And now these drones, it’s terrible.
When I came here [to Nastya’s flat] for the last time, I had to bring some things with me. It’s a long way to carry a bag. I was walking along, and there was still greenery [i.e. leaves on deciduous trees]. Soldiers recommend standing under large trees. [Russian drone operators] don’t like it when there’s greenery, they can’t see under there. When the leaves are gone, the drone can lock onto you.
So I’m walking along, and there’s a drone. I stood underneath a tree. Then I go on, and the drone follows, and I’ve got nowhere to hide. I just threw away my bag and stood under some fence, thinking, what, am I a military target? Or what am I? I don’t understand. That’s how people live in Kherson.”
This sort of thing happens all the time?
“My late husband was hard of hearing, and sometimes I heard a drone and he didn’t, and I said, hide. But those first ones were small, and carried a small charge. When I was standing in the yard I saw one hovering over us, going up and down.
There was a white bus parked across the yard from us, and it dropped on that and blew up. The two-storey house beside it caught fire. The houses in our area are very close together, and there was such a fierce fire… The firefighters couldn’t come, because the Russians do this on purpose. If there’s a strike somewhere, and a fire starts, and the firefighters put it out, the Russians start shelling again, or more drones come and drop more bombs.
The first drones were small and carried a small charge, but now they are bigger and the charges are very big. When they drop them… A lot of our neighbours have suffered. Some young lads were in the yard and a drone saw them and dropped its charge. One of them lost his leg, suffered trauma to his skull and was in a coma for two or three weeks. The other was seriously injured in his side.
They were just riding scooters. And one of them lost his leg. The other was seriously injured. They were just ordinary people who had to go somewhere, and there’s no public transport.
A lot of elderly people have stayed. Some of them don’t think they need to leave. They’re not waiting [in hope that the Russians will come and liberate them]. They’re Kherson people. Some of them just say, this is my home, and I’m not going anywhere. And some people are still working. It’s not just old people there. But the young need something to live on so they work. There’s even cafes, and the shops are open. There aren’t many markets, as it’s so dangerous, especially on weekend and holidays. A lot of incoming hits markets and supermarkets.
I said to my neighbour, Halya, you shouldn’t go to your house. A grenade landed just two doors down from you. And literally a week later she was on her way home from work and she saw a bus. Not many of them are still in service. She wanted to run for it, but someone distracted her. She said she spoke to them because it was someone she hadn’t seen for a long time. And the bus left.
And, can you imagine, it said online that that after two stops… a lot of people died and were injured in that bus. She came home in hysterics. I told her, Halya, God protected you because one person can only bear so much at once.
And at the same time, people live and work here. One woman I know, she and her husband are medics and they’ve been working since the first day of the war. They even worked during the occupation. Because people needed help.
What a beautiful, comfortable green city Kherson was. You know what they call it now? Cardboard City. I didn’t understand why at first, but it’s because the particleboard blocks the windows. And it’s cardboard-coloured. When you travel around the city, everywhere there’s broken windows, and the particleboard helps stop the glass. So many places have been hit, and more than once, and the glass goes flying.”
Do you have friends who’ve stayed in Kherson?
“Yes, I do. I have some neighbours who live in a different part of the city, on an island where the situation is even worse. Their son’s house is here on the mainland and they came to see him. Last summer he had an operation on his prostate and now he has to always be somewhere with a bathroom so he can wash, because it’s a problem for him. He can’t take public transport.
Their nephew wanted to come and get them [and their son], but she says, how can I do that? It’s dangerous to let a car come to us. How can I put him in such danger? No, it’s better for us to be here than for me to put a young boy into that situation. And so they’re still there. Their windows have been broken by shrapnel many times, and the neighbouring house collapsed. She’s already had two cancer operations. What have these people done? What kind of threat to the country are they, that they can’t be allow to live in dignity in their old age?
[The Russians do it] to intimidate people, to put them in such a state that they give in and say do, whatever you want, take whatever you want, just don’t shoot. But they’re getting the opposite reaction, you know? Even people who were OK with it are now singing a different song.
There can be no thought of us joining with Russia. I was surprised, horrified, when we were captured in three days, almost without a fight. I was in tears. Then the city rose and even the old people went to the square and were just walking and standing around, and we saw [Russians] filming specific people, so those people tried to whisper, but then they were captured. They just came and took the man from his apartment. His wife was there, eight months pregnant. To this day, I don’t know where he is, if he’s alive.”
Are the hospitals still open?
“Our doctors are constantly working. There was another strike on the city yesterday. Our estate was hit again. More destruction, and people died. But the hospitals keep working. If part of one of them is struck, they move to another part which is being repaired, and so on. My neighbour even had an operation, although the cancer unit has been completely destroyed. They had to disperse around the city, but they keep working, because people need consultations and treatments.
And the electricity is working, the water supply is working. But it’s all so dangerous. Because the Russians see those as legitimate targets. How can you fire at an ambulance driving along? But they do that a lot. For no reason at all. And then when people are injured and others come to help them, they send drones to drop explosives on the ambulance.”
Is it possible to fight the drones?
“You know, [our army] are fighting the drones. I don’t know exactly how, but we hear guns shooting them down. I even saw it when some firefighters came. And there were lads with anti-drone guns, or maybe the firefighters themselves had them.
The city needs more protection against drones. The river is 800 km long and the Russians are on the other side. The drones fly so fast – you see one, then a moment later it’s gone who knows where. Or you hear the sound but don’t see it. And then it’s on top of you.”
Are there volunteer organisations helping in Kherson?
“Not in our area. They consider it dangerous to go there. Any volunteer activity isn’t organised, and we don’t get much. [My neighbour] Marina always needs nappies for her husband. We do what we can… But if you call the Red Cross there’s nothing. Someone helps here via a third party, someone helps there.
In our area, the girls have organised themselves. They drive out themselves, load the car and bring it back. The last time… I called Olha and she said, getting this humanitarian aid is a real quest!
We collect money. They might give you humanitarian aid, but you’ve got to pay for the car [to carry it home] yourself. Then anyone who can goes down the block to bring it back. With all those drones around. There’s a huge prickly tree, an acacia I think, next to the school, and they dumped the aid there, and we took it in turns to go, with no more than one or two of us at a time so there would be no crowd, to collect the humanitarian aid for distribution. It’s a real quest.
Here in Mykolaiv, there’s a hub for Kherson residents. They called me and said which day I should come. You just turn up and receive [aid]. It can be organised that way. The local housing cooperative do it. But there’s nothing like that in our area. Or along the whole embankment. In a word, it’s dangerous and nobody goes there. But there are people in need. Ambulances don’t go there either. And that’s hard…
My husband died at the end of November. And the ambulance couldn’t come. Even to collect his body. It happened in the evening, and they said they couldn’t come until 6 a.m. when it got light. And even when we brought him to the morgue, we’re driving up to it, and there’s a drone flying by… The man from the morgue just took me quickly into the building, and the car stayed there. But it wasn’t attacked.
And that’s how people live.
There are thousands of people facing these dangers in Kherson daily. Two days after I conducted this interview, Marina herself took a trip back to take things to her neighbour. She had no encounters with drones this time and got lucky on the long isolated walk back from her house to the nearest public transport, as the lone car on the road stopped and gave her a lift.
Yet this appalling story has dropped out of the headlines. There is one good reason for this: foreigners are mostly barred from the city, as the administration doesn’t want the scandal if they’re killed. It’s possible to apply for entry, but success is not guaranteed. Some Ukrainian media continues to report from Kherson.
Exactly why the Russians are doing this is explained a number of different ways too: it’s training for drone operators who will later hit military targets; it’s revenge for the liberation of the city; or it’s just fun for them. I suspect all three are true. But no possible ‘reason’ could make chasing down, taunting and murdering elderly people in the streets anything other than evil.
My heart breaks every day for the people of Kherson. I was last in the city in September ‘24 and thought it too risky to go back there since. Unbearable life. And Russians just destroy it and kill people for nothing, because they can’t have it. Thank you for sharing this really important story.
"I told her, Halya, God protected you because one person can only bear so much at once."
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