Since Russian forces withdrew across the Dnipro in November 2022, the river has formed a largely static front line through the Kherson region. But the war around it has continued to evolve. Artillery, tank fire, guided aerial bombs, and thousands of Russian drones now reach a city only a few hundred meters from enemy-held territory, reshaping civilian life, essential infrastructure, and the work of those defending Kherson from the sky.
The Dnipro runs through the heart of Ukraine. It passes Kyiv, where Russian ballistic missiles currently pose one of the most immediate threats to the capital and its people, then continues south through a landscape of fields, reservoirs, and broad plains toward the Black Sea.
In the Kherson region, the river no longer simply crosses the country. It divides it.
The river that became a front line
Since November 2022, when Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson and Russian troops withdrew beyond the Dnipro, the river has formed one of the war’s most persistent lines of contact. Farther east, the front has continued to shift – through villages, fields, and tree lines, with territory gained and lost by both sides. Here, the basic geography of the war has remained largely unchanged: Ukraine holds the city on the western bank, while Russian forces remain entrenched across the water.
But a static front does not mean a static war. Over the years, both sides have dug in, adapted, and transformed the wider area along the river into a place where the rapid evolution of drone warfare can be seen with particular intensity. Nowhere is that transformation more visible than in Kherson, where Russian first-person-view (FPV) drones cross the Dnipro in such numbers that the threat from above has become part of the city’s daily life. Only days ago, on Aug. 19, a Russian FPV drone struck a municipal bus traveling through Kherson’s Korabelnyi district. Four passengers were killed, five others wounded.
“Human safari”
The city may have been freed from occupation, but never from the war itself. Artillery, mortars, and tank fire can reach across the river. FPV drones have added a different dimension to that danger. Around the clock, they search for movement, change direction, and follow their targets through the streets.
In Kherson, there is a term for what has emerged from this: “human safari.”
It is used by residents, officials, and those working in the most exposed districts to describe Russian drone operators deliberately hunting civilians. Cars, cyclists, and pedestrians have all come under attack. Earlier in August, footage that circulated widely showed a fruit vendor in Kherson trying to escape an FPV drone that pursued him around his vehicle as he attempted to keep the van between himself and the aircraft. He survived the explosion, but wounded by shrapnel.
Where the city gives way to the Red Zone
Across Kherson, the threat has reshaped the cityscape. Anti-drone nets stretch above roads in different parts of the city, most visibly along major routes, forming long canopies over the traffic below.
Cars race through the streets because spending as little time as possible exposed inside a vehicle has become part of the logic of moving through the city. In the most dangerous areas, even familiar rules are reversed. Drivers and passengers are advised to leave their seat belts unfastened and the doors unlocked, so they can abandon the car within seconds if a drone approaches.
North of the partially destroyed and now disused railway station, in the part commonly referred to as Tavriiskyi, something resembling ordinary urban life remains. Cafés and restaurants are open, people shop for groceries, traffic moves through the intersections. But even here, normality is conditional. Explosions reverberate across the city, as Russian attacks reach all districts and grow more frequent with each passing week.
Toward the Dnipro, the urban landscape begins to look markedly different. This is where Kherson gradually gives way to what residents and those working there call the Red Zone. The farther south one goes, the more public life recedes, until there are stretches where almost nobody is walking at all. More windows are boarded up, then entire buildings. Broken glass lies along street after street, glittering between potholes and fragments of masonry.
The Red Zone has no precise border. It is less an administrative designation than a description of proximity and exposure, a part of the city where the river, and the Russian-held bank beyond it, are never far away.
More than 2,000 drones a week
Yaroslav Shanko rejects the distinction between the so-called yellow and red zones. “The whole of Kherson is in an active combat zone,” says the head of the City Military Administration. “There is no safe place – not a single one in the Kherson community or in the city itself.”
Shanko is sitting at a table in one of the few cafés still operating in the Red Zone. He neither orders coffee nor reaches for the water. His manner is calm and assured, his answers come quickly and firmly.
The city around him – its water and electricity, hospitals, transport, evacuations, and the people trying to keep all of it functioning – ultimately falls within his responsibility.
The figures give some sense of the scale. According to Shanko, more than 2,000 Russian drones are recorded over Kherson each week, with around 90 percent intercepted, destroyed, or suppressed. The actual number may be higher. And the threat is evolving.
Compared with the previous year, he notes, Russia is not only launching more drones but also adapting the technology behind them – frequencies, components, guidance systems, and other characteristics. “Drones are technologies that are constantly changing.”
When helping means becoming a target
For those tasked with responding after an attack, the danger does not end with the strike itself. Reaching the wounded can expose those trying to save them.
Police officers, medics, firefighters, and municipal workers have all been hit, he adds. “They are a priority target for the enemy.” In the most dangerous areas, ambulances and ordinary police vehicles may be unable to enter, forcing the authorities to rely on armored vehicles and specially prepared evacuation teams.
Even something as mundane as removing a burned-out car can become a security operation. Wrecks remain scattered along roads in the Red Zone, sometimes because removing one requires sending heavy equipment and a crew into an exposed street, putting both at risk.
The same problem runs through almost every municipal task. “The main problem is the security factor,” Shanko says.
Infrastructure presents the same dilemma on a larger scale. Electricity, water, and heating have to be repaired even as those carrying out the work face the same danger, while the facilities are repeatedly targeted. “Our municipal workers are heroic people. They work every day under threat to their lives and health.” The previous winter, he recalls, was the most difficult Kherson had faced since the full-scale invasion, with Russian forces attacking the city’s heat supply almost daily. He expects the coming winter to be no easier.
“Kherson is an unprecedented case”
Hospitals have adapted by moving parts of their operations underground. “Medical care is still being provided.” Kherson, Shanko notes, was the first city in Ukraine to systematically relocate medical services beneath the surface, offering patients and staff greater protection. Schools no longer function normally either. More than 4,000 children remain in the wider community, and some of the spaces where they can meet, learn, or exercise are now below ground.
Whatever precautions are taken, the city official makes clear, there is currently no way to make Kherson truly safe. What remains possible is to keep the city functioning in circumstances in which almost every ordinary municipal task has acquired a military dimension.
“Kherson is an unprecedented case,” Shanko stresses. “It is a city that is practically on the front line.”
Unlike other cities, where the front may lie dozens of kilometers away, the geography here leaves little separation between city and battlefield. “Guided aerial bombs, drones, tank fire, artillery, Grad – everything they have,” he says. “The enemy is mercilessly destroying our city.”
From occupation to the front line
Farther south, closer to the Dnipro, the boundary between city and battlefield becomes increasingly difficult to discern.
Kherson’s historic center grew from this part of the city after its founding in 1778. Today, some of its oldest streets lead through increasingly severe destruction. Older buildings line the roads, some still retaining their façades but little behind them, others opened by shelling, their interiors exposed to the street.
At a street corner only a few hundred meters from the Dnipro, two soldiers from Ukraine’s 34th Marine Brigade “Borysfen” scan the sky, rifles in hand. Throughout the area, fragments of FPV drones lie scattered on the ground – pieces of frames and small components among the debris.
Their call signs are Kavun and Riznyk – “Watermelon” and “Butcher.” They are part of a mobile air-defense team tasked with intercepting Russian drones over Kherson. Across from their position stands a damaged school. During the Russian occupation, Kadyrov-aligned Chechen troops were quartered there. Before their withdrawal, they left inscriptions on desks, including a message: “We are Kadyrovtsy. We are here forever.” They were not.
The occupation still hangs heavily over Kherson. Many of those who lived through it find it difficult to speak about what happened during those months. Riznyk spent about five months under Russian rule. He saw men being taken away, he recalls, and civilians shot in the street. The former electrician later joined the Ukrainian military. His wife and two children now live in Poland. Members of Kavun’s own family still live under occupation in Oleshky, across the Dnipro.
Waiting for what comes across the river
Today, the two men stand outside the ruined school, watching for Russian drones. Their positions change constantly, and there is little to suggest they intend to stay: a folding chair, sleeping bags, cigarettes, drone detectors, and ammunition. Tomorrow, they may be somewhere else.
Some days are quiet. On others, the two men may encounter six or seven FPVs. On particularly intense days, the number can reach 20, even 40. Riznyk explains that Russian operators do not simply send their drones indiscriminately across Kherson. They search for infrastructure and vehicles whose destruction can have a broader effect: gas stations, hospitals, police cars, and fire engines among them.
“They are not fools,” the 49-year-old says. “They try to hit something critical, something important.” When there is nothing important to strike, he adds, they turn to civilians. Kavun agrees. What he has seen most often is Russians attacking ordinary people.
The Marines speak without visible unease. They remain relaxed, occasionally smiling at one another, sometimes amused by questions whose answers have long since become obvious to them.
Their work is coordinated around the clock with other teams, including units operating interceptor drones, as information about incoming aircraft is passed between them. They use their rifles primarily to shoot down FPVs, as well as other Russian drones such as Molniyas. Shaheds, flying faster and generally higher, require other means of interception.
“They are learning all the time”
Kavun has been doing this particular work for about three months. The 33-year-old, who worked in construction before the war, has seen the pattern of Russian drone attacks change even within that short period. For a time, Molniya drones appeared more frequently, but now the men are again dealing primarily with FPVs. Fiber-optic models are becoming more common, while Russian pilots have grown increasingly adept at flying extremely low, maneuvering beneath roofs before sending the drones into a dive.
“They are cunning, like foxes,” Kavun says. “They are learning all the time.”
Across the Red Zone, those flights have left their traces everywhere. Hair-thin fiber-optic cables hang from trees and bushes, stretch across roads and cling to buildings and bus stops. Often they are almost impossible to see until the light catches them. Then, suddenly, dozens of strands emerge, draped across the surroundings like spiderwebs.
Fiber-optic guidance removes one of the fundamental vulnerabilities of conventional FPVs. Instead of depending on a radio link that can be jammed, the aircraft remains physically connected to its operator as kilometers of cable unwind behind it.
The drones themselves are changing as well. Kavun recently shot down one built largely from 3D-printed components, something he had never seen before. Molniya drones that once carried roughly 4 or 5 kilograms (9-11 pounds) of explosives have already appeared with payloads of around 15 kilograms (33 pounds), the men say.
“Of course it is scary when you run out and there is a drone,” Kavun acknowledges. “But you understand that this is your job, and if you take it down, you save someone’s life.”
When artillery, mortar, or tank fire comes in, there is little they can do but get out of the way. Sometimes only seconds separate the sound from the impact. “We try to run,” Riznyk puts it simply. “That’s all.”
If Russian forces locate their position, the Marines say, they will shell it relentlessly. Their safety therefore depends less on being beyond the enemy’s reach than on not being found.
“This is no life”
Near the Dnipro, the few civilians who remain have learned their own ways of judging when it is safe to move. Some rely on the Marines themselves. Kavun notes he rarely meets anyone in the Red Zone who does not understand what the air-defense teams are doing. Quite the opposite: some residents have come to know the soldiers operating around their neighborhoods, taking their phone numbers and contacting them before venturing outside.
In fact, any reassurance the Marines can offer is only temporary. Both believe the civilians should leave. “Of course they should evacuate from the Red Zone,” Kavun says. “This is no life.” But he immediately adds the complication. Some have nowhere to go and little money to live elsewhere. The men have met residents who simply tell them they will remain in their homes until they die. “We cannot force them.”
A city that cannot plan for emptiness
Yaroslav Shanko reaches much the same conclusion from the perspective of the city administration. “The security situation has definitely worsened,” he says. Mandatory evacuation zones have expanded, while guided aerial bombs (KABs) have added another layer to the threat. Such strikes have increased sharply and are hitting parts of the city farther from the river.
Kherson once had a population of roughly 300,000. Today, a little more than 60,000 people remain in the city itself and just over 70,000 in the wider municipality, which includes around 10 surrounding settlements, according to Shanko. Many of those who remain are elderly. All four people killed in the Aug. 19 bus attack in Korabelnyi district were older residents: a 69-year-old man and three women aged 63, 71, and 89.
For Shanko, the deterioration of the security situation leaves little ambiguity about what residents who have the possibility to leave should do: “Of course I would advise people to evacuate.”
Yet the administration cannot plan for an empty city. His staff, Shanko explains, works on two timelines at once: responding to Kherson’s immediate needs while preparing for its future. “Kherson is functioning now.” Water, electricity, and gas remain available throughout most of the city. Hospitals continue treating patients.
“Their main goal is to terrorize the civilian population and make the city unsuitable for life,” Shanko argues. “But ordinary people in Kherson still go to work every day. They show that this is not the case.”
The two Marines remain outside, looking upward. “A good day is when nothing flies,” Riznyk says, “or when we shoot down everything that flies.” Kavun leaves what comes next open. “We need to finish this war. After that I will think.”
Not long before, word had reached the men that a civilian had been killed by an FPV drone elsewhere in the Red Zone, reportedly while sitting in a car. It was outside their area of responsibility.
For them, it was still a bad day.