Newsweek61%
Russia Hunts Ukrainians in ‘Drone Safaris’ As 17 Killed in Huge Kyiv Strike 36%
By Ellie Cook50%
8/5/2026, 5:35:17 AM
Keywords: Russia Ukraine War, Russia, Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, Kherson, Kyiv, Drones, Ballistic Missiles
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 16.3% saturation with 173 hits. Analysis detected 2,048 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,064 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.7% and a BS Rank of 36% (19,676 of 30,584 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 64.30% of the article peer group.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russian troops are "deliberately" hunting Ukrainian civilians with drones in the south of the country, as Kyiv contends with both the threat of cheap unmanned vehicles close to the front lines and the sophisticated missile barrages launched against its major cities far from the heart of the fighting.
The Ukrainian leader said on Tuesday a Russian drone "deliberately hunted down" a man selling vegetables in the southern Kherson region, where Ukrainian-held territory has been largely separated from Russian-occupied ground by the Dnieper River since late 2022.
The drone "detonated right next to him" and injured the man, Zelensky said.
Ukraine's national police, which shared footage purporting to show the drone menacing the man, identified him as a 52-year old resident of the nearby Mykolaiv region and said he was treated for shrapnel injuries and other wounds.
Analysts have for months accused Russia of targeting civilians with drones in southern Ukraine, particularly Kherson, in so-called "human safaris."
Russia is using drones in Kherson City, the regional capital, to home in on civilians as a "purposeful tool of war," the U.S.-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said on Tuesday.
Ukraine's police and the country's foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, accused Russia of committing a war crime.
Russia has consistently denied targeting civilians, which is generally considered a war crime under international law.
Zelensky had said in May Russia had "essentially organized a safari-like hunt for civilians" in Kherson, calling for more air defense systems and personnel to protect the Ukrainian population in the area.
Zelensky's statement on Wednesday came just hours before Ukrainian officials said at least 17 people had been killed in a "massive" Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region, hundreds of kilometers from the eastern front lines.
Another 44 people were injured.
Russia fired 24 ballistic missiles, four of its hypersonic Zircon missiles and more than 100 drones at Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities said.
Ballistic missiles are often difficult for air defense systems to intercept because they travel much faster than cruise missiles or drones.
They follow less predictable trajectories and fly much higher, plunging almost vertically toward their targets so air defenses have less time to react.
Hypersonic missiles travel upward of five times the speed of sound, and only the U.S.-made Patriot air defense system is credited with intercepting them in Ukraine.
"Ballistic missile interceptors could have saved the lives of those killed today," Zelensky said on Wednesday.
"It is very important that our partners understand that delays in supplying them, or an unwillingness to provide anti-ballistic systems, lead directly to such horrific casualties and destruction," he added.
Patriots have for years been at the very top of Ukraine's wish list of equipment from its allies, but both the systems and the interceptors they fire are in high demand and scarce supply across the world.
Ukraine has lamented that Patriot interceptors have been diverted away from the systems deployed around its cities to the Middle East since the U.S. launched its war against Iran in February.
President Donald Trump had said he would grant permission for Ukraine to manufacture its own version of the U.S.-designed Patriots within the country, before appearing to roll back on this pledge last week.
"We don’t really licence equipment," Trump told the Financial Times on Friday.
"We have to be a little bit careful of who we licence to."
Trump refused to provide hundreds more Patriot interceptors to Kyiv during a meeting with Zelensky in the White House last week, the FT reported.
Low stocks and no way to refill the Patriot batteries with interceptor missiles capable of taking down Russia's advanced weapons leaves Kyiv, and other densely populated cities, exposed ahead of what Ukrainians predict will be another winter of heavy bombardment.
A joint European effort to build a new "anti-ballistic missile" defense won't be ready by the coldest months in Eastern Europe.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Wednesday one person had been killed in the city itself, and 26 people had been injured, with 16 of those admitted to hospital.
Timur Tkachenko, the head of the broader Kyiv regional administration, said nine people had been killed and another dozen wounded in Brovary, a city on Kyiv's eastern outskirts.
Russia struck warehouses belonging to civilian companies and a railway station, Zelensky said.
Russia's defense ministry said its "precision" strike had hit transport hubs and distribution centers in and around Kyiv, including two sites in Brovary Moscow said stored parts for long-range drones.
Ukraine has upped its own campaign of long-range drone strikes on warehouses belonging to Russia's largest online retailer and the country's oil facilities, hoping to cut off vital sources of revenue for Russia's military and hammer home the impact of the war to Russian residents as far removed from the Ukrainian front lines as Moscow.
Three cargo ships, which Russia said were carrying weapons for Ukraine's military, were damaged in waters just off the coast of the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa, the Russian government said in a statement on Wednesday.
Officials in Odesa issued an air alert for the area early on Wednesday.
'Drone Safaris' a War Crime, Ukraine Says
Alexander Prokudin, who heads up the Kherson regional administration, named the 52-year-old man in the clip shared by Ukrainian authorities on Tuesday as Yuriy.
His wife was nearby, and the pair had just started to lay out vegetables to sell to residents in Kherson when the Russian drone approached, Prokudin said.
The drone then circled and chased Yuriy for roughly a minute while his wife fled the scene.
"The one who was driving the drone could see his target perfectly," Prokudin said in a statement posted to the Telegram messaging app.
Sybiha, the Ukrainian foreign minister, accused Moscow of a "deliberate and systemic" strategy to target civilians with drones in Kherson, and called for the international community to condemn the alleged practice.
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.
Although not every attack that kills civilians is deemed a war crime, it's forbidden to intentionally target civilians or civilian targets that don't have any military value, like hospitals or schools that haven't been repurposed by the armed forces.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Frances Mao and Tony Phillips.
Speakers
11speakers47%attributed speech566writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageSybiha, the Ukrainian foreign minister
31 attributed words6.2% of attributed speech85% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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