A video released by Ukrainian police shows a drone circling a van that doubles as a market stall, then detonating as the man dives behind it. Officers said the victim, in his 50s, suffered shock and shrapnel wounds. Officials later named him as Yurii, 52, and released a bedside interview filmed in the hospital.
On X, Zelenskyy said the clip had shaken many people, calling it another installment of the drone safari Moscow runs against civilians in Kherson and saying Russia had gone mad. He pressed for stronger security guarantees and for action that would make Moscow think seriously about peace instead of widening the reach of its drones.
Yurii’s account, given to the regional administration and posted on Telegram, had the flat tone of a man describing something that nearly killed him. He had just put up his umbrella and started unloading boxes, his wife beside him, when the buzzing began. The drone came in from behind the market, flying low, and he could not see it until it was on top of him. Around the stall there is only open steppe, nowhere to run. He showed wounds on both legs and his back; his wife fled and was unhurt. Oleksandr Prokudin, who runs the regional administration, said the seller had come into the city that morning to sell produce, a routine errand.
The drone was an FPV craft, the small first-person-view type that has become the signature weapon of this war, cheap to build and brutal in effect. Kyiv Post, which also covered the incident, described the footage as showing a remotely piloted drone hunting a man at a street market in Kherson City.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha described the attack as part of a deliberate campaign to frighten civilians, a crime that should draw international condemnation and prosecution, and argued that the public only learns of a fraction of such attacks.
Reuters checked the location against satellite and archive images, matching the street layout, buildings and vegetation. The timing could not be verified independently; Ukrainian police and Sybiha said it happened on Tuesday, August 4. Moscow’s Defense Ministry stayed silent when asked about the incident.
The figures are getting worse. In July, the UN monitoring mission in Ukraine reported 1,396 civilians killed and 7,978 wounded in the first half of 2026, up 37 percent year over year and more than double the 2024 total. The mission blamed Russia’s growing use of long-range missiles and drones against cities far behind the front.
Moscow has its own charges. On Monday, it said seven people, three of them children, died at the Black Sea resort of Gelendzhik when a Ukrainian drone came down on the beach. A Kyiv official said Russian air defenses had knocked the drone out of the sky, insisting that Ukraine aims its weapons only at military-industrial and economic infrastructure.
Ukraine keeps striking Russian territory with drones and missiles, and Russian authorities say civilians have died in those attacks too. The same day as the Kherson video, Ukrainian drones reportedly hit Wildberries warehouses near Moscow and St. Petersburg while a refinery burned in Syzran, according to the Kyiv Independent’s daily briefing, part of the reciprocal campaign of long-range strikes. Each side denies targeting civilians in a war Moscow started with its 2022 invasion. The drone that nearly killed Yurii was caught on camera; most such attacks, Sybiha said, never surface at all.