Since its liberation two years ago, the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson has been ravaged by daily airstrikes from the opposite bank, still occupied by the Russian army. Ernest Safonov, 57, parks his van under the trees and walks quickly a few hundred meters to his house, located 300 meters from the Dnieper. There isn’t a cat on this mid-November afternoon. The employee of the city council’s culture department makes sure to keep his feet on the asphalt “through the mines [antipersonnel] Lepestok Let the Russians launch their drones over the city. “They are very well camouflaged.”. On the other side of the Dnieper we can see the left bank, still occupied by the Russian army. “Luckily there is no longer a sniper ahead”he said upon arriving at his pavilion, in a neighborhood marked by numerous projectile impacts and apparently completely deserted.
You hear the drone of a quadcopter drone. Ernest jumps against the wall of his house and looks at the sky, tense with fear. The sound changes pitch, indicating that the drone is moving nearby. After a few tens of anxious seconds, the sound disappears. “If it is an enemy drone, it will drop its payload further away and return empty to its pilot.”explains Ernest, who has now regained his calm. It shows a Russian quadcopter that fell near his car this summer, after failing to detonate its grenade. “I think Kherson is a training area for Russian drone pilots. They train us civilians before going into battle. Here we call it the “safari”. »
Between the bank of the Dnieper and Perekopska Street there is a deserted strip 800 meters wide. The scars of the bombings are visible everywhere. There is no one on the streets, and if a vehicle passes by, it drives like crazy. But the danger goes much further. This summer, as drone strikes against civilians peaked, a Russian Telegram channel dedicated to the attacks on Kherson posted a map of the city with three quarters in red to designate a “forbidden zone”. “Any vehicle that circulates in this area is a legitimate target”repeats almost daily on the Telegram channel “From Mariupol to the Carpathians”, hosted by Russian military bloggers, illustrating their comments with videos of drone grenade launches on civilian vehicles and, sometimes, on pedestrians.
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