"I was holding two heads of garlic, and it was chasing me." A seller from Kherson tells how a Russian drone hunted him

52-year-old Yuriy, a vegetable vendor at a market in Kherson. A drone pursued him around his sales van, then exploded nearby. Yuriy sustained numerous shrapnel wounds to his back and legs, but his condition is now stable, Euronews reports.

Yuriy recalls that the day started as usual. He and his wife arrived, began unpacking goods, having parked their van at the farmers' market.

"We had just started unpacking vegetables. I had just set up the awnings and started bringing out crates. My wife was also there," the 52-year-old man said from his hospital ward.

"We heard a hum; it wasn't visible, it flew out from somewhere behind the market, from the bushes, and flew very low," he added.

Footage later published by the National Police of Ukraine shows a small FPV drone appearing over the market and beginning to chase a man in dark clothes who is running around his white van.

The drone descends and changes direction, following his movements.

Yuriy says his wife immediately started running as soon as she heard the noise. The drone, he recalls, then seemed to target only him.

"My wife started running away, and it began to turn, heading towards the car," he says.

"I gestured to it, like: 'Look, here are vegetables,' but it started to dive at me. I ran, crashed into the car. It turned out we were aligned, it hit, and I just fell. Then I saw that the car was damaged," Yuriy recounts.

The man claims there was nothing at the attack site that could even remotely resemble a military target.

"I wasn't filming it, nothing like that. I was actually holding garlic. If you look at the video, I have two heads of garlic in my hands. I was showing it: 'Look, there's only agricultural produce here'," he says.

"You yourselves saw in the video that when I was running away from it on that side, it was descending under the umbrella. It saw that there were already tomatoes, some cucumbers, eggplants on the ground. Meaning there was nothing else there."

The attack was characterized by Ukrainian authorities as part of a broader practice of "human safaris" — attacks on civilians.

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, stated that "the video shows Russia's true tactics: to pursue and kill innocent people."

"The world must not look away. This is how Russia hunts civilians," Lubinets declared.

UN observers report a sharp increase in civilian casualties from drone attacks this year.

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