There's a pretty simple way to challenge your assumption here. Here is the Wiki for your example. [1] Apparently a ballpark of 200 civilians were killed there in the years between the war's start and late 2025. So let's assume you're right and Russia genuinely wanted to just go kill civilians in Kherson. It's a city that had a pre-war population of about 280,000.
How many do you think they would have managed to kill? 200 is quite easy to see happening from air defense mishaps, occasional mistargeting, and other such issues - but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians. A campaign against civilians would have multiples of that number per day in such a location.
> How many do you think they would have managed to kill?
They killed 200 and wounded 2,000. This is information from a year ago.
> but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians.
No, it is not. It's not like they are only attacking civilian targets or concentrating all the drones allocated on that section of the front on Kherson city. Also, Ukrainians regularly eliminate such small drones, so only a fraction manages to actually get through and injure/kill someone.
There are many sources linked on that Wikipedia page extensively documenting Russian human safari in Kherson. There are many videos, such as this one:
You're blindly relying on information from a combatant aligned side in the midst of a war which has had an unprecedented degree of 'information warfare' with the claims of one day constantly shown to be lies of tomorrow. You should ignore most of everything except that which is completely falsifiable. Deaths are 'kind of' that. They generally are not going to be made up, but figures are going to be massaged. Civilian deaths will be overestimated, troop deaths will be underestimated.
Videos can be fabricated, misattributed, misleading, or all of the above. But the data is in the deaths. You don't have a substantial intentional targeting of civilians and only 200 civilian deaths over a period of years. It's just complete nonsense. That's an aspirational rate of minimal civilian deaths by the standards of most of any conflict. Kherson is 'hot' and had a population of 280k. Obviously most people left it since the start of the war, but by any measurement that's still a civilian death rate well under 1% in a hot zone, during an active war. That is phenomenal.
And this generalizes. Even given the obviously fabricated military casualty rates for both sides, the civilian casualty rate for Ukraine is the lowest of any major conflict in modern history, by a wide margin. [1]
> You don't have a substantial intentional targeting of civilians and only 200 civilian deaths over a period of years.
You cannot know this unless you also know the number of drones that actually get through the Ukrainian defenses and manage to reach Kherson city, find a target, and attempt an attack.
> Even given the obviously fabricated military casualty rates for both sides, the civilian casualty rate for Ukraine is the lowest of any major conflict in modern history, by a wide margin.
This is fully expected in a modern inter-state (not civil) stalemate war between approximately peer powers, and says nothing about the propensity of any side to attack civilians. It is hard to even get a chance to attack a civilian, unless the attacker first gets through the established military defense. Contrast this with civil wars where the front lines are unclear and fluid, or wars where one side is much more powerful than the other, so civilians of the other side are fully exposed - they generally have much higher civilian casualties.
The civilian casualty rates aren't a raw rate, but a ratio of civilian casualties to military casualties. So you'd be left trying to argue that Russians are good at killing soldiers, but not good at killing civilians, and the whole argument becomes increasingly unreasonable.
The Wiki on the Human Safari page gave a variety of numbers on the number of attacks. They claim around 100 strikes a day, with a peak in excess of 300. Even if you have a 95% interception rate, which you don't, that's 5+ a day getting through. If you actually are aiming for civilians you can also easily hit high population areas with those 5 that get through. Even when just targeting individuals, that'd be 200 in 40 days - and we're speaking of years. And that's also ignoring that the thousands of other disabled drones are crashing in random locations and sometimes detonating, which will also randomly kill civilians on occasion.
> So you'd be left trying to argue that Russians are good at killing soldiers, but not good at killing civilians, and the whole argument becomes increasingly unreasonable.
Yes, Russians are much more likely to kill a soldier than to kill a civilian. This is simply because in Ukraine, civilians tend to be much farther from them compared to Ukrainian soldiers. We have already seen what happens if this condition is not maintained (the destruction of Mariupol, the torture chambers discovered in deoccupied territories).
> Even if you have a 95% interception rate, which you don't, that's 5+ a day getting through.
Why shouldn't they have a 95% interception rate, or even higher? Non fiber optic drones can be taken out by EW, fiber optic ones are shot down by mobile anti-drone crews. And it's not like it's easy to find a civilian target in accessible areas of Kherson. There are not many civilians remaining, and those remaining are all aware of the danger and reside in the western parts, move cautiously, carry drone detectors and hide if a drone is discovered. Ukrainian soldiers have the entire eastern part to intercept the drones with no risk to civilians.
There were 280,000 civs in Kherson. It's now in the 60,000 range. That's a lot, a whole lot, any way you look at it, and all well within the range of drones. The drone interception rate was around 80%, excluding jet powered drones for which it is dramatically lower. For that matter Kherson is within Russian artillery range. They could easily inflict civilian casualties in the thousands in very brief order if they wanted to.
> For that matter Kherson is within Russian artillery range. They could easily inflict civilian casualties in the thousands in very brief order if they wanted to.
I think you are severely overestimating the effectiveness of artillery, if you think Russians could kill thousands in very brief order by using it, especially in warzones where people are aware of the danger. After the first hits, people tend to take cover. It would take an awful lot of shells to kill thousands with artillery (tens of thousands of shells). Then there is the issue of artillery use being risky in this war: Ukrainians have counter-battery radars, the battlefield is monitored by drones, and artillery piece is a very prized target. There is a reason why drones now kill more people in this war than artillery.
You're completely right that drones have overtaken artillery in terms of death, but why? Artillery is cheaper and far deadlier. You can level entire areas with relatively small numbers of artillery shells. See: Bakhmut/Artemovsk where artillery was heavily used for some terrifying imagery. A fortified city turned into something that looks like a scene out of a post nuclear holocaust movie. [1]
The reason is precisely because drones are more effective at killing soldiers, especially mobile soldiers. If you want to go wreck some civilians, point artillery at their residency and you're going to have a mountain of corpses after a few shells. Taking cover will only apply for those well outside the epicenter. Many will be dead before they know they're under attack. Artillery doesn't discriminate and kills anything and everything within a wide area, and in many scenarios that is very undesirable.
You find yourself constantly having to make quite unreasonable arguments if one wants to think that civilians are being intentionally targeted, whereas if you assume the opposite then basically everything suddenly makes 100% sense.
Apart from human safari, there is also issue with hostage situation in Oleshki and thousands of dead by Russians using them for target practices and not allowing them to leave.
How many do you think they would have managed to kill? 200 is quite easy to see happening from air defense mishaps, occasional mistargeting, and other such issues - but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians. A campaign against civilians would have multiples of that number per day in such a location.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_safari_(terror_campaign)