Ukraine on Tuesday accused Russia of committing a war crime after a video was released showing a drone chasing down and wounding a street vendor in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson.
Footage released by Ukrainian police shows the drone pursuing an unidentified man around a van being used as a street stand before exploding after he dives for cover behind the vehicle. Police said the vendor, a man in his 50s, survived but suffered shock and shrapnel injuries.
The date could not be independently confirmed, but Ukraine’s police and foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said the incident happened on Tuesday.
Sybiha said the attack formed part of a deliberate Russian campaign to intimidate civilians. “This barbaric Russian war crime in Kherson demands international condemnation and justice, but thousands of similar crimes never come to the public eye,” he wrote on Telegram.
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The minister said the pilot of the Russian drone would have been aware they were targeting a civilian, branding them a “sadist”.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian drones struck warehouses belonging to online retail group Wildberries and other targets across Russia overnight, killing five people in the Moscow region, a day after another attack left seven people, including three children, dead on a Black Sea beach.
Wildberries has become a key target for Ukraine’s long-range drones as Kyiv aims to bring Vladimir Putin’s war closer to home and destroy logistical networks that it believes are used to supply the Russian military with drone components and military equipment.
A fire broke out at a Wildberries warehouse near St Petersburg on Tuesday, although there were no reported casualties. Another Wildberries facility in the Tver region, north-west of Moscow, was damaged without causing injuries, acting regional governor Vitaly Korolyov said.
[ Why Ukraine is targeting Russia’s answer to AmazonOpens in new window ]
But an overnight strike in the city of Chekhov in the Moscow region, where a drone attack set a facility ablaze, killed five people and injured 10 others, according to the region’s governor Andrey Vorobyov. It was not clear whether that warehouse belonged to Wildberries.
Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, confirmed the attack on the Wildberries warehouse near St Petersburg. In a post on Telegram on Tuesday, he said that over the course of 18 days, Ukrainian deep-strike drones had targeted 15 Wildberries facilities and burned down 13.
Kyiv sees Wildberries as a key logistical hub for the transfer of parts used to produce drones that have wrought death and destruction on cities across Ukraine.
Senior Ukrainian officials said the strikes on Russia’s version of Amazon are also a direct response to Moscow’s attacks on dozens of facilities belonging to Nova Poshta, the largest Ukrainian private postal service.
Russia fired one ballistic missile and 136 attack drones at Ukrainian targets overnight, according to Kyiv’s Air Force. A food storage facility was hit in Dnipropetrovsk region, according to local authorities.
Russian forces also launched guided aerial bombs at the city of Sumy, killing two girls aged five and 10 and an elderly woman, according to the regional governor Oleh Hryhorov.
The overnight drone barrages followed a Ukrainian strike on Monday that killed seven people, including three children, after the weapon hit a crowded beach in the Black Sea resort town of Gelendzhik, in the southern Krasnodar region. Forty other people were injured, with 17 taken to hospital, according to local authorities.
Video footage showed a drone flying towards a tree line before diving and exploding on the beach as tourists watched from the shore and in the water. A cacophony of small-arms fire from Russian air-defence systems can be heard in the video.
The drone appears to have been aiming for a nearby building used to manufacture Russian cruise missiles and other weapons but was instead brought down short of the target.
The Ukrainian military has not commented on the beach strike but president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly said that Kyiv does not target civilians.
Turkey on Tuesday warned about the conflict affecting commercial shipping, after two Turkish-owned civilian vessels were struck by unmanned aerial vehicles overnight.
“There is serious concern that the war between Russia and Ukraine is spreading in the Black Sea, affecting civilian vessels,” the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that this could have “multiple adverse consequences, including for food security”.
Commercial shipping has increasingly been affected by the war, despite international efforts to safeguard maritime navigation. The Black Sea carries roughly 5 per cent of global seaborne oil trade and is an even more important transit point for food.
Meanwhile, the death toll in Ukraine from Russian air strikes has surged. The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) said last month that at least 293 civilians were killed and 1,990 injured in June, marking the deadliest month for civilians since April 2022. Some 282 civilians were killed and 1,794 injured in May.
Danielle Bell, head of the HRMMU, said the rising number of deaths “shows an alarming escalatory trend with mounting civilian toll, driven by the intensifying use of powerful weapons that are particularly deadly when used in densely populated urban areas”.
“This trend should serve as a warning that the risks facing civilians are not only persisting but growing in both scale and complexity,” she added. - Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026. Additional reporting: Reuters
