Russia does not for a moment back away from the "human safari" in Ukraine's Kherson Oblast. The occupiers continue hunting Ukrainian pensioners, even those who are 83 years old, with FPV drones. This is exactly what happened on 23 May, according to Ukraine's National Police.
The incidents are the operational extension of the documented pattern Ukraine's Office of the Prosecutor General released a day before: 5,303 criminal proceedings for drone attacks on civilian infrastructure in deoccupied Kherson Oblast, 287 civilians killed, including children, 2,549 wounded, including 41 children.
Russia's attacks on Kherson city alone account for 44% of the oblast's drone deaths and almost 69% of its drone-wound casualties.
Russian forces struck multiple Kherson Oblast communities, killing a 30-year-old man and a 64-year-old woman, and wounding more than 20 civilians across at least six separate incidents.
Woman killed in house fire after FPV strike ignites private home
In the Ukrainka community, a Russian FPV drone wounded a 52-year-old woman and two men aged 63 and 83.
All three were taken to the hospital with explosive trauma, traumatic brain injuries, and shrapnel wounds, the police said.
In Kostyrka, Russian forces dropped explosives from a drone on a 69-year-old man, who suffered explosive trauma, traumatic brain injury, concussion, and multiple shrapnel wounds to his face, chest, abdomen, arms, and legs.
In Bilozerka, a 45-year-old local was struck by an FPV drone in the street and sustained mine-explosive trauma and abrasions.
In the Dniprovskyi District of Kherson city, an FPV drone strike killed a 30-year-old man and wounded another resident, whose identity is being established.
Russian artillery shelling of the Korabelnyi District of Kherson city wounded six people aged between 34 and 80 — four women and two men — all with explosive and traumatic-brain injuries and shrapnel wounds.
In a separate incident, an FPV drone strike on a private house ignited a fire. A 64-year-old woman died inside the building.
The pattern
The documented "human safari" framing in Kherson predates today's incidents by more than a year.
Independent Western investigations, including CBS News' 60 Minutes documentation and reporting by major US and European outlets, have established that Russian FPV-drone operators have been pursuing specific civilians along defined routes. Among them are bus stops, supermarket entrances, pension queues, and residential courtyards.
The hunt has been concentrated geographically in the right-bank parts of Kherson Oblast that Ukraine de-occupied in November 2022, against civilian populations that returned to live there after the Russian withdrawal across the Dnipro.
Today's pattern of named victims by age — 83, 80, 69, 64 — fits the demographic concentration the broader documentation captures: elderly residents whose mobility limits their ability to flee a drone approaching from above, and who form a disproportionate share of those killed and wounded in the city's residential districts.
