Drone Safari: Moscow Made It a Sport
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named what he saw in the footage with the precision of someone who has learned that euphemism costs lives: a "drone safari.
There is a man at a market in Kherson — ordinary Tuesday, the kind of morning that smells like bread and diesel and the particular mundanity of buying vegetables while a war moves through your country like weather. He is carrying something. Moving between stalls. And somewhere above him, a Russian drone finds him, pauses, and follows.
The video exists. Ukraine's National Police released it. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named what he saw in the footage with the precision of someone who has learned that euphemism costs lives: a "drone safari." Not a military operation. Not collateral damage. A hunt. The target was a market vendor in a city that has no strategic value at this particular Tuesday morning — only the value of being somewhere people still try to live normally.
This is the part that doesn't fit the geopolitical framework, the part that falls between the lines of diplomatic briefings. Denmark's ambassador to the United Nations said this week that Russian strikes have become more brutal — and the word "become" is doing a great deal of heavy lifting there. What Denmark is really saying, carefully, in the language of international bodies, is that a threshold has been crossed and nobody has found the mechanism to enforce it.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, thousands gathered to bury 112 people killed in Israel's 2023 attack on the Sabra neighbourhood — remains recovered from rubble, carried finally to ground. Mass funerals have a particular grammar of grief: the scale that should be incomprehensible, somehow comprehended because it has to be. The people of Sabra did not get to grieve in real time. They got to grieve now, three years later, in a ceremony that is also an accounting.
And in America, a different kind of conversation is accelerating. The co-founder of Foundation Future Industries said plainly that he would build armed autonomous robots for the U.S. military if asked — not hypothetically, not in the abstract, but tomorrow. Human rights experts are alarmed in the way that people are alarmed when the thing they feared begins to have a timeline and a name and a founder willing to go on record. The machines that follow people through markets, the machines that decide what constitutes a target — the logic is more connected than we prefer to admit.
What unites Kherson, Gaza, and a robotics lab in America is not ideology. It is the question of who gets to decide when a human life becomes an acceptable coordinate — and who, if anyone, is building the architecture to answer it.
The stones in Valletta don't move. The light through the baroque windows is the same light it always was. I read these dispatches and think about what it means that normal life is still the thing worth destroying.
*Isla Camilleri, Global Affairs & Lifestyle Editor*
