The man was walking home with meagre supplies in a rucksack from a grocery shop when he first noticed a dark, squat shape perched on a building ahead. Suddenly a sound like dozens of miniature handheld fans turning on at once made his heart sink. He could only watch helplessly as the deadly Russian drone took off – it had been waiting for him.
Like some scene from a futuristic dystopian horror movie, the drone’s launch signalled to this Ukrainian civilian that a Russian pilot somewhere across the front line had decided it was his turn to take part in the life-and-death reality of a “human safari”. Hunted like animals by remote aerial death deliverers, the civilians of Kherson – on Ukraine’s eastern front line – are facing this nightmare every single day.
As Donald Trump, Sir Keir Starmer and other world leaders talk about a peace with Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin war machine is still finding new ways to terrorise ordinary Ukrainians. Catherine Kostryka has lived in Kherson, a city in one of the regions Putin wishes to claim in a peace deal, since the beginning of the invasion in 2022.
She has bravely agreed to speak to the Daily Express about what life is like being stalked by death from above and has given a chilling account of daily life. “The Russian drone pilots are 100% deliberately targeting civilians, they are not even trying to hide it,” she says.
“If you look through Russian sources, their own Telegram channels and videos, their own propaganda… They call what is happening here a ‘safari’. These drone operators are trained on civilians, we can’t do anything to them. A few weeks ago, they targeted a one-year-old child. The other day they targeted women at the bus station.”
She disagrees with the opinion of some people who say the drones are trained on finding undercover Ukrainian soldiers.
“I could understand that if it is a bulky-looking man, but when it’s a seven-year-old boy playing football in the garden with his friends, I don’t believe this is true,” she says. “It happened the other day, a few kids were playing in the garden and the drone came and just dropped the weapon on them.”
Catherine has heard many accounts of people being targeted and a friend of her mother was stalked by a drone recently. Chillingly, the drone was able to avoid giving away its position through sound by sitting dormant on a building like a spider waiting for its prey.
She explains: “One of my mum’s friends was almost killed by a drone. He was coming home from work and the drone was sitting on some kind of garage and it was waiting for him.
“The drone operator flew it towards him, the guy almost lost his leg, the backpack saved him. He was on fire and had to have plastic surgery, but he survived.”
Just walking out of the door now for Ukrainians is an exercise in “hyper vigilance”, says Catherine, when people must remember something similar to a horrifying wartime highway code – “look up, look down and listen”.
“Whenever you go outside you are always listening and looking at the sky, but sometimes drones are not just flying around, sometimes they will sit on a rooftop and just wait.
“Also, you need to look down as well because the Russians fly over drones carrying small civilian mines and drop them. They are a green camouflage colour, so you must be hyper vigilant, or you’ll step on one and be blown up.”
In May, an independent report commissioned by the UN concluded Russian armed forces have “committed murder of civilians as crimes against humanity using drones”.
The damning findings described the use of the remote weapons against civilians as “widespread, systematic and conducted as part of a coordinated state policy”. It added that nearly 150 civilians have been killed and hundreds more injured because of the drone attacks in Kherson city and 16 localities in the Ukrainian-controlled areas.
The UN said victims were mostly men, but also women and children. In a sickening detail, the report said the drone operators “used video feeds transmitted in real time by the cameras embedded in the drones, focused on targets that were visibly civilian, and dropped explosives on them”.
Ambulances and emergency services have also been struck, meaning many people living in Kherson are unable to get life-saving medical care. Catherine says Putin may believe his tactics will make Ukrainian
civilians scared, but what he was really doing was making them “really angry”.
“We all know that drones can see what they are dropping stuff on, it’s very delusional to think they are just going after soldiers,” she adds. “If you go through the psychology of it, it is hard to kill a person looking them in the eye, but when it looks like a computer game, when you are destroying a pixel and that’s it.
“I don’t know what to think about the pilots. I think they lost their souls, and I don’t know what has happened in Russia to make them such violent beasts. Russia has liked to destroy and make atrocities, just look at Bucha, they like to make people afraid of them. It’s a tactic they use everywhere.”
Kherson was occupied by Russian soldiers from March 2, 2022, until November 11, 2022, leaving civilians completely cut off from each other and the outside world. Catherine, who works as a translator, survived those dark days but revealed how she lost her uncle because of the conflict.
“He had heart and liver problems and he died under occupation when the Russians cut off mobile phone signals,” she says. “It was a period of time when you could not call for an ambulance, you could not call your loved ones.
“We visited him a few times a week, he didn’t want more than that. And then we found him dead. He couldn’t call for help and we didn’t know he needed it.”
She sighs as she recalls: “It wasn’t a bullet or shrapnel, but it happened in an environment the Russians created.” Speaking about the recent meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska, Catherine is not optimistic about what the West can do to help.
“People from the West don’t really understand what Russia is [like]. The Baltic countries they know, we are neighbours and know what they are, so we will fight,” she says.
“At the beginning of the war I was hoping for support from the United States, Germany, and Britain. I feel like the West is completely spineless. People say democracy should win, but dictatorship is winning right now.” Trying to sum up the psyche of the Russian soldiers and leadership waging war on her country every day, Catherine explains Putin is like a tsar and his people are used to being his slaves.
She adds: “From the Russian perspective, they have had him in power as president on and off for more than 20 years. A lot of people were born while Putin was president so they don’t know what it is like to have a different president, they don’t know what democracy is… Putin is their tsar.
“We Ukrainians, like a lot of Europeans, we hate our own government, but it’s a normal thing to do. They don’t do what we want them to do, so we protest, call them names, but this is normal.” She is not a fan of President Volodymyr Zelensky but says the country has united with him “to get the Russians out of our country”.
She adds: “Putin had a famous saying when he became president along the lines of: ‘Any person who stays in power more than eight years, goes insane’. Well, he’s been in power more than eight years, and he has gone insane.
“He lives in a golden castle of his own mind, and he believes he is incredible and has his own delusions that people in Russia love him.
“And he believes that Ukrainians will love him, but we hate him, and we will not be his slaves no matter how many drones he puts in the sky.”
She has a look of determination in her eyes. “If we are in a safari, we are the lions who are going to eventually eat the hunter.”