Yuri is a 52-year-old Ukrainian who runs a market stall in Kherson, not far from the front line. Yesterday, he was sorting through vegetables when he heard the loud, distinctive buzz of a Russian drone. As he later told the journalist Zarina Zabrisky, he had nothing more than a couple of garlic bulbs in his hands, and no weapons. “Not even a phone.” He gestured at his tomatoes and peppers, so that the drone operator, whoever and wherever he might be, could see that he wasn’t a soldier.
The drone kept following him. Police footage shows it chasing Yuri around his truck. He hides under the umbrella that covers the stand, runs from one side to the other, gestures at the vegetables. Then the drone dives beside him and explodes. Miraculously, Yuri survived, with just cuts and a concussion. Zabrisky interviewed him in the hospital, where he was lucid, and surprisingly sane.
Sane might be the key word here, because the experience of being chased by a murderous kamikaze drone, a flying machine that behaves as if it were alive, is not one that humans are equipped to understand. Premodern fanatics used to hallucinate flying devils. But few modern civilians have been chased by mechanized flying objects. Unless they live in or around Kherson.
Today, many were shocked by yet another video of the drone “safari” Russians are carrying out against civilians in Kherson. A Russian drone deliberately hunted down a man selling vegetables and detonated right next to him. The Russians even admitted to the crime, showing zero… pic.twitter.com/uGjC7esFwR
— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) August 4, 2026
Since 2024, Russian drones have been conducting human safaris in Kherson and other parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, tracking Ukrainian civilians with the aim of killing them. When I reported in the city in 2023, no one went near the Dnipro River, because the Russians were on the other side. Rapidly changing technology has now put the whole city and surrounding countryside within range of Vladimir Putin’s forces.
A United Nations inquiry last year documented hundreds of drone attacks on individuals across eastern Ukraine that targeted people walking on sidewalks, working in gardens, driving ambulances, commuting to work. Sometimes drones hang over burning buildings, waiting for fire brigades to appear so that firemen can be murdered too. The motive can only be terror, and perhaps revenge. Russian troops occupied Kherson at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022; Ukrainian forces took the city back seven months later following what remains the most significant counter-offensive of the war.
Many people, myself included, have written about the incredible achievements of the Ukrainian drone industry. In Kyiv, I’ve visited warehouses where hundreds of different drones and robots, each with specialized properties, are on display. They can defend Ukrainians and surveil and attack enemies. They can deliver food and weapons. They can crawl along the ground and rescue people stranded in no-man’s-land. They can make intelligent decisions autonomously.
Drones with capabilities like the ones that hit Yuri originally offered a humanitarian advantage, allowing their operators to avoid civilian casualties. Because they have cameras, the remote operator can see whether the target is really a soldier or military object, and call off the drone if it is not. But as with all technologies, the purpose can be radically altered by the users. Instead of avoiding civilians, Russian operators can now target them, as if playing a video game.
They will not be the last drone operators to do so. Although not all Pentagon procurement officers (or indeed Pentagon leaders) know it yet, nobody is prepared, technically or psychologically, for a new era of intelligent, deadly machines. Warfare is on its way to being transformed beyond recognition. Separate drone battalions are a thing of the past. Every aspect of fighting now requires drones, and drone interceptors.
How long until the rest of the world also experiences this change? Crime and terrorism will be transformed next, followed by the work of lawyers and police. Today’s bizarre dystopia, something we view in video clips coming from Ukraine, might be tomorrow’s new normal.
Mostly young, mostly male Moroccans crawling onto beaches, climbing hills, scaling walls, jumping over fences, surging past police in order to get into Europe: The photographs and videos that emerged from Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa, on July 29 and 30 looked very much like migrant-terror videos, deliberately designed to be broadcast by the international far right. So closely did this incident resemble the “invasion” that MAGA and its European friends have long said is under way that it was hard not to suspect that it had been orchestrated.
As I am writing this, much is still not known about the 60,000-odd people who swam from Morocco to Ceuta last week. But we do know that many of them saw social-media posts encouraging them to swim to Ceuta and, perhaps, to thereby precipitate a crisis. Ceuta has been a Spanish city since the 16th century, but it is not part of mainland Spain. Nor is it possible to cross from Ceuta to mainland Spain, and therefore into the Schengen Area, the European Union’s free-movement zone, without crossing a checkpoint. Illegal immigrants cannot travel from Ceuta to mainland Spain at all.
Last week, according to El Pais as well as other Spanish, international, and Moroccan media outlets, many Moroccans saw a TikTok video nevertheless claiming that “the Spanish border is open and you can cross without papers,” meaning they could reach the European continent. The video appeared to reference a recent ruling by the Spanish supreme court making it harder to return migrants who arrive by sea, but it was not the only encouragement. Other messages, many of which have now disappeared, told people where to buy wet suits, flippers, goggles, floats, and even waterproof bags for documents and cellphones. Screenshots from Google Maps told them which sections of the Ceuta beach might have fewer police. Moroccan border guards were either unwilling or unable to stop them.
Surprised by the unprecedented numbers and perhaps fearing hundreds would drown—in the end, at least 70 people died in the water, including some children—the Spanish police let them land on the beach. This is when the photographs and videos began to circulate. Among those promoting them were senior members of the Trump administration, and senior leaders of the European far right.
Vice President Vance posted a link to a wildly dishonest Fox News segment that incorrectly described the migrants arriving in “Northern Spain” rather than Northern Africa. “Thank God,” he wrote, “@POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this.” Others made more specific threats. Robert Jenrick, a high-profile member of Reform, the British far-right party, wrote that “Ceuta is our future if we don’t secure our border. These men are on their way to Calais.” Nigel Farage, the Reform Party leader, posted a video also claiming that the Moroccans were en route to Britain. Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), declared that “Germany is the likely destination.”
These were lies. The Moroccans who swam to Ceuta were never going to make it to Britain, Germany, or anywhere else in Europe. Once again: Access to Ceuta does not give anyone automatic access to the rest of Europe. More to the point, nearly all of those who swam over the border had returned to Morocco by Sunday morning. The Spanish government negotiated their return with the Moroccan government. Moroccan police resumed blocking the border. Spanish police, according to El Pais and the Financial Times, were checking documents in Ceuta to find any Moroccans who illegally remained.
It remains unclear who created the viral posts that encouraged the would-be migrants to believe that they could get to Europe from Ceuta. But those who want to weaken the Spanish government, boost the European far right, and create turmoil inside the EU lost little time in promoting the photographs as soon as they arrived.
Because the Moroccan border guards did not stop the would-be migrants, some have speculated that the Moroccans themselves might have been behind the incident. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, was recently in Algeria, holding a friendly meeting with one of Morocco’s great rivals. Morocco might also want to put pressure on Ceuta and another Spanish North African city, Melilla.
The Trump administration, which has also questioned Britain’s control of the Falkland Islands and Denmark’s control of Greenland, might be interested in the same thing. Recently, a congressional report described the cities as “under Spanish administration,” rather than a part of Spain. Trump himself has reasons to be pleased with Morocco, which has joined his Board of Peace and named a highway in his honor. He also has reasons to dislike Sánchez, who refused to let the U.S. use Spanish military bases for Trump’s war in Iran and says he will not, like the rest of NATO, raise his country’s defense spending to 5 percent of its GDP.
Others also had reasons to exploit the incident. Inside Spain, where Sánchez’s administration and party are under investigation for corruption—a former party leader is alleged to have ties to Chinese and Venezuelan criminal networks—the prime minister has plenty of opponents. One politician from Vox, the Spanish far-right party, visited Ceuta and called for “everyone to defend their family with whatever they have at hand.” The Ukrainian foreign minister published a list of Russian outlets that enthusiastically piled on too.
As a result of these posts, many people, perhaps millions of people, will believe that the “invasion” succeeded. They are wrong. Whatever you think of Sánchez or his government, he did not open Spain’s borders to this wave of Moroccans. Instead, he spoke of an “attack on Spain’s territorial integrity.” Spanish police recovered the dead, put the injured in hospitals, and appear to have sent almost everyone home.
The misleading comments and images posted by Vance, Jenrick, Farage, and Weidel nevertheless remain online, with no correction or retraction. President Trump, who declared on Saturday that “the same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse, much bigger,” has not praised the Spanish prime minister for resolving the problem. Nor has the State Department, which issued a travel warning and a statement accusing the Spanish government of making “deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe” and then went silent after the crisis was resolved.
This would not be the first time that a migrant wave has been boosted on social media in order to create a political crisis. In 2021, the Belarusian government imported planeloads of people from the Middle East, brought them to the Polish border, and told them to cross, provoking a political crisis in Poland. The Moroccans themselves are accused of having done this too, in 2021, when they allegedly relaxed border controls to express their annoyance with Spain.
But the most important precedent was in 2015, when the Russian destruction of Syria produced a massive wave of migration that also was filmed and photographed, especially after Germany declared that it would accept hundreds of thousands of war victims as refugees. Social-media posts showing migrants walking toward Europe, some amplified by the Russians who destroyed Syria, then played a major role in the Brexit campaign in the U.K., as well as the rise of the far right in Germany. The scars left by this memory are so deep that several European leaders, including the social-democratic prime minister of Denmark and the nationalist prime minister of Italy, this week accused Sánchez of endangering the Schengen Area even though, once again, the integrity of the zone was never threatened.
Readers can be forgiven for feeling a strong sense of déjà vu. For more than a decade now, European and indeed American politicians have known that real, fake, enhanced, or context-free pictures of migrants jumping fences will immediately create a wave reaction. Military rhetoric will be used—attack or invasion—and, to quote Vance, “radical left-wing globalist policies” will be blamed. Hardly anyone will ask why it is that so many people are so desperate to move that they will risk their lives. Few will mourn the dead.
Instead, far-right and MAGA politicians, influencers, and podcasters will immediately use the most divisive language possible in order to make voters as angry as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of what actually happened. Almost everyone else will be intimidated by their fury. As it turns out, it’s harder to stop the wave of anger than it is to stop the migrants themselves.
This article originally included the incorrect year for a previous incident in which Morocco allegedly relaxed border controls.
Login
