WAR AND INNOVATION - HOW UKRAINE REVOLUTIONIZED CIVIL DEFENSE

So to start our discussion, I just wanted to have you give us the lay of the land in here, son, what we're talking about.

You have written that the locals describe the situation as a quote unquote human safari in which Russian forces are effectively hunting Ukrainian civilians for sports.

In the Kiev Independent, you wrote the following, and I'm quoting here.

What makes Kherson different from everything else we are seeing is how personal it is.

A Russian operator sits across the river in safety, pulls up a person on a screen, maybe a woman at a bus stop, an old man walking a dog or a family car driving home, and decides to kill them.

They can see exactly who they're about to kill, and they do it anyway while filming.

That's pretty harrowing.

So describe for us what was happening in Kherson, and in broad strokes, what you and your organization did to try to counter this.

Sure.

So first of all, Kherson...

Population of the city used to be over 200,000 before the full scale war.

Now it's down to about 60,000 that's still in the city.

And when you're talking about personal, that's really personal what's going on inside of the city, right? I call it one big war crime scene.

Because right now, like you mentioned, and like I've written in the article, when Kherson was liberated, basically the front line just moved across the river.

So these Russian drone operators set the shop across the river.

And they're using cheap $500 commercial drones to hunt civilians.

So basically they, especially when there is a bright and sunny day, the sounds in Kherson is constantly buzzing.

You know, there's days that drone strikes happen anytime, anywhere between five to ten minutes in intervals during the good weather, right? So they do the hunting with the FPV drones and they also drop the mines.

So basically when you're in the city, you have to watch out for two things.

To not step on a mine and not to get hit with the...

And they particularly targeting civilians because what they do is they see everything on the screen and they zoom in on a target and they chase them and then they.

Tag them, that's why we call it Human Safari.

And then a lot of them actually take the videos and they post on the Telegram as a video game, right? So we've been working in Kherson since this was liberated, right? Just to give you an idea that before to get into Kherson and work there was pretty simple.

It was not a lot of logistics you need to be involved in.

But right now, specifically with this drone warfare, we had to really adapt our strategy.