The Atlantic Council
Russia is deliberately targeting Ukrainian civilians in a deadly drone strike campaign that aims to depopulate large parts of the country, according to a new United Nations report. The probe by UN human rights investigators found that Russia’s actions in southern Ukraine amount to the crimes against humanity of “murder and of forcible transfer of population.”
Fresh details of Russia’s war crimes against Ukraine’s civilian population were presented this week in a new report produced by the UN Human Rights Council-appointed Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. The investigation focused on Russian drone attacks in an area spanning more than 300 kilometers on the right bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine including parts of the Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv provinces. Based on large quantities of publicly available video evidence and interviews with over 200 Ukrainian citizens, the report concluded that Russia was guilty of “systematically coordinated actions designed to drive Ukrainians out of their homes.”
Russian military drone operators in southern Ukraine were found to have routinely targeted individual Ukrainian civilians along with public transport, cars, private homes, and civilian infrastructure in a bid to establish a “permanent climate of terror.” At least two hundred Ukrainian civilians have reportedly been killed in these drone attacks since July 2024, while thousands more have been injured. Some are the targeted areas in southern Ukraine are now “almost entirely vacated.”
The UN investigation identified numerous instances on Russian attacks on first responders, including the bombing of ambulances and fire brigade crews attempting to provide emergency aid following earlier strikes. With sudden death from above now an everyday fact of life for the local population, residents of southern Ukraine say they feel hunted and refer to the relentless Russian drone attacks as a “human safari.”
