
How Russian Drones Target Civilians in a Small Ukrainian City
Beryslav sits on the Dnipro River within range of Russian positions across the water, and in the past year its streets have seen nearly 150 civilians killed or injured by drone strikes. DW's investigative unit spends six months building the case, working with the Mnemonic archive and the Centre for Information Resilience to cross-check Ukrainian government casualty reports against hundreds of Telegram posts documenting individual attacks. Reporters travel across Ukraine to interview survivors, local officials, humanitarian workers, and military analysts about a weapon that until recently was mostly a battlefield tool: the first-person view drone, cheap, hard to intercept, and now apparently being flown deliberately at pedestrians, cyclists, and cars in a city with no military value. The film lays out the evidence for who is likely piloting these strikes and why, while treating the harder question, whether targeting civilians this way is becoming a deliberate tactic rather than an aberration, as still open. Interviews with the wounded and their families anchor the investigation in specific, named incidents rather than statistics alone.