Russian Drone Hunts Street Vendor: Human Safari Caught on Video
The recording shows the vendor — alone, on foot, carrying nothing — being tracked and chased by a remotely-controlled drone across exposed terrain.
Video footage circulating on social media and verified by Ukrainian officials shows a Russian military drone pursuing a civilian street vendor through open ground in what Kyiv has formally categorised as a war crime, according to the BBC.
The recording shows the vendor — alone, on foot, carrying nothing — being tracked and chased by a remotely-controlled drone across exposed terrain. The pursuit is sustained. Deliberate. The person runs. The drone follows. There is no military target in the frame.
Ukraine's armed forces published the footage alongside a formal accusation, arguing the attack demonstrates a systematic Russian policy of using precision drone technology not against military infrastructure but against individual civilians — hunting them, in the language Kyiv used, like prey.
The incident is not isolated. Ukrainian officials have documented a pattern of drone strikes targeting non-combatants in occupied and contested areas, with low-cost first-person-view drones increasingly deployed against people rather than positions. What was once an asymmetric military advantage has become, in documented cases, an instrument of terror at the individual scale.
Russia has not responded to the specific footage. Moscow has consistently denied targeting civilians throughout the war.
The International Criminal Court has an open investigation into alleged Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Whether this footage enters that record depends on a documentation chain that Ukrainian prosecutors say they are actively building — one video, one vendor, one drone at a time.
