Fr. Ihor Makar, director of a local Caritas office in Kherson, Ukraine, was driving to a church Monday to celebrate Divine Liturgy for the feast of the Theophany (Epiphany). With him in the car were several seminarians. Fr. Makar suddenly noticed what appeared to be a drone in the sky. With so many recent Russian drone attacks apparently targeting civilians, he was naturally cautious, but there wasn’t much he could do.
“Because of the frost, the road was very slippery, and we could neither stop nor turn back,” Fr. Makar told Vatican News’ Svitlana Dukhovych. “I realized that this drone was probably targeting us."
Indeed, the drone launched an explosive device, shattering the windows of Fr. Makar's car and piercing its doors and wheels with shrapnel. The priest’s leg caught some of that shrapnel, which will have to be surgically removed. The seminarians were not injured.
The news was also reported by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
On the same day, in the nearby village of Shyroka Balka, the Russian military launched explosives from a drone, killing a 48-year-old man who was standing in the street.
Kherson’s military administration told the BBC that there’s been a surge in Russian drone attacks since last July, with more than 400 civilians injured in over 5,000 drone attacks.
The problem has become so bad that residents of Kherson wait for bad weather, when it’s more difficult to fly drones, before they go out shopping and running errands.
Trying to empty a city?
It wasn’t the first time Fr. Makar, a chaplain of the Knights of Columbus, has been affected by the war, which has been ongoing since 2014.
In 2022, he and his wife and four children had to abandon Antonivka, a Kherson suburb on the banks of the Dnipro River that found itself on the front line when Russia launched its full-scale invasion almost three years ago.
Using the Western Ukrainian city of Ternopil as a base, Fr. Makar proceeded to coordinate deliveries of food and medicine to parishioners when Russia occupied Kherson. Even after Kherson was liberated in November 2022, Russians continued to attack from the other side of the Dnipro, where they hold Ukrainian territory.
The use of drones against civilians is, in the estimation of The Financial Times, a “concerted Russian campaign to empty a city by stalking its residents.”
“The killer machines, sometimes by the swarm, hover above homes, buzz into buildings and chase people down streets in their cars, riding bicycles, or simply on foot,” said the magazine.
FT reported that the Russian military sometimes packs small anti-personnel mines called “petals” into tubes that are “dangled from small quadcopter drones, then scatter them along streets, courtyards, playgrounds, and public squares.”
