Around 5 a.m. on 19 May, a Russian drone found a 68-year-old man on a street in the Korabelnyi district of Kherson and dropped its charge on him. He survived but lost a leg. The blast tore it off where he stood, and police carried him to a hospital, where doctors are now trying to keep him alive.
He is one more name in a campaign Kherson residents call the "human safari" — Russian operators on the far bank of the Dnipro River using small drones to track and kill people going about ordinary mornings. He had stepped outside. That was the whole of what he did.
The city military administration said the man suffered a blast injury and a traumatic amputation of one leg, and that officers took him to hospital for treatment. Ukrainian news agency Interfax-Ukraine reported the strike around 05:00 in Korabelnyi, a district hit by drones repeatedly in recent days.
Further strikes in Kherson region
The attack closed out a 24-hour stretch the regional military administration logged as drone terror, air strikes, and artillery across nearly 40 settlements and the city of Kherson — Antonivka, Bilozerka, Stanislav, Beryslav, Tiahynka, Lvove, Zmiivka and on down a list that reads like a regional map. Russian forces struck social infrastructure and residential blocks, damaging an apartment building and 12 private houses. They also hit a bank branch, private garages, and cars. Two people were killed and 14 wounded over the day.
None of this is incidental. A UN Commission of Inquiry first concluded in May 2025 that Russia's drone hunting of civilians around Kherson amounts to a crime against humanity, and in autumn 2025 extended that finding across more than 300 kilometers of Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv oblasts. Investigators traced the chain of command up to the Kremlin. They documented the same method each time: a camera drone follows a person who is running away, waits, strikes — and then comes back. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia uses Kherson's streets as a live training range for new drone operators.
The drones do not stop for markings. Five days before this strike, on 14 May, FPV drones hit a clearly marked UN humanitarian convoy delivering aid in one of Kherson's worst-hit areas. The head of the UN's humanitarian office in Ukraine, who was with the mission, said afterward that he did not know who carried out the attack. Russian Telegram channels then posted footage that appeared to show it.
The 68-year-old man was not on a convoy and not a target of any military value. He had a leg until about five o'clock this morning.
