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Understanding the conflict four years on.
Drones are stalking civilians and aid workers in Sudan, hunting children and the elderly through the streets of Kherson in Ukraine, and terrorizing Indigenous people in Mexico and in the Indonesian province of Papua. They’re increasingly cheap and accessible, well-nigh impossible to ban, and, making matters even more confusing, are also used globally for peaceful purposes, like saving lives in the aftermath of the devastating Nepal floods. Today, over a decade into the consumer drone boom, more people than ever before are being killed by unmanned aerial vehicles—and the world is still doing far too little to stop the violence.
In Ukraine, targeted attacks with small, short-range first-person-view (FPV) drones, bleakly referred to by locals as “human safaris,” killed 395 civilians and injured 2,635 between February 2022 and April 2025. In January that year, per United Nations data, drones became the most common cause of death for Ukrainian civilians. In June 2026, drone attacks on Ukrainian civilians reached a new crescendo, with 89 deaths and 588 injuries recorded by U. N. monitors in that month alone.
Drones are stalking civilians and aid workers in Sudan, hunting children and the elderly through the streets of Kherson in Ukraine, and terrorizing Indigenous people in Mexico and in the Indonesian province of Papua. They’re increasingly cheap and accessible, well-nigh impossible to ban, and, making matters even more confusing, are also used globally for peaceful purposes, like saving lives in the aftermath of the devastating Nepal floods. Today, over a decade into the consumer drone boom, more people than ever before are being killed by unmanned aerial vehicles—and the world is still doing far too little to stop the violence.
In Ukraine, targeted attacks with small, short-range first-person-view (FPV) drones, bleakly referred to by locals as “human safaris,” killed 395 civilians and injured 2,635 between February 2022 and April 2025. In January that year, per United Nations data, drones became the most common cause of death for Ukrainian civilians. In June 2026, drone attacks on Ukrainian civilians reached a new crescendo, with 89 deaths and 588 injuries recorded by U. N. monitors in that month alone.
Drones have also become a key feature of the ongoing war in Sudan, where combatants on both sides use a layered combination of smaller, cheaper drones and sophisticated long-range military drones (sourced primarily from Turkey and China). Civilians are paying the price: According to a June statement from U. N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, his office recorded over 1,000 civilian deaths from drone strikes in Sudan between January and May 2026.
Drug cartels in Mexico are increasingly using small drones to attack civilians—often focusing aerial terror campaigns on Indigenous groups. Recent data from Colombia’s Ministry of Defense reported a stunning 8,395 weaponized drone attacks by militants in 2025 alone.
In Myanmar, both sides of the conflict use small drones with deadly results for civilians, and in the war in Gaza, both Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces have made extensive use of modern drone technology. In Papua, Indonesian government efforts to suppress separatist fighters now frequently involve both small consumer-type and larger military drones, which surveil and occasionally attack Indigenous communities have been killed in these attacks in the last two years.
Armed drone attacks are also becoming a key risk to humanitarian and healthcare workers, according to a recent report from the U. N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). From 2024 to 2026, drones attacked aid workers in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza, among other locations.
In 2026, drone attacks are more brazenly and intentionally targeted at civilians than they have ever been before, as part and parcel of a marked global decline in respect for international humanitarian law itself. If the world fails to take action, this wave of mechanized violence will only continue to worsen.
What form should that action take? First, global decision-makers must reckon with just how much drone warfare has changed—technically, operationally, and legally—since the technology first rose to popular awareness during the war on terror years.
Twenty years ago, there was little realistic way for civilians to shoot down, jam, or otherwise affect the activities of a U. S. government MQ-9 Reaper drone. Today, as drones become smaller, cheaper, and lower-altitude, civilians have (famously) taken down threatening drones with a well-aimed jar of pickles, as one woman did during the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
She is not alone: In the drone-inundated war zones of 2026, civilians are no longer content to remain passive victims of aerial terror, and there are many practical measures that they can take against the small, short-range, lower-altitude drones that feature in war today. Ukraine provides many such examples, from the farmer who took down Russian drones with a shotgun until he was eventually killed by a drone himself, to the Ukrainian aid groups that are beginning to equip civilians with both drone-survival training and devices capable of detecting drone signals.
Beyond these active measures, civilians today also build drones from component parts in their living rooms and in impromptu basement workshops, buy and transport drones to the front lines, and provide advice and sophisticated technical support and software for combatant drone pilots—often from the safety of their office chairs on the other side of the world. Many of these anti-drone actions could, at least potentially, cause these civilians to lose their noncombatant status under international humanitarian law (IHL). It is also clear, based on our own experiences, that many civilians remain unaware of this risk—exposing a serious gap in IHL education on the ground.
The technology is moving fast. Per one possibly apocryphal story, a Ukrainian drone factory puts out a cookie every time it launches a new drone design and assumes that once the cookie goes stale, so has the design. This tale reflects another crucial, challenging reality for civilian protection: Modern drone warfare changes, evolves, and pivots at breathtaking speed, a profound departure from the far more slow-moving U. S. defense contractor-driven drone innovations of the past.
Today, the vast majority of small battlefield drones are either store-bought and easily hacked and modified Chinese consumer products or custom-built drones cobbled together from open-source software and inexpensive, readily available electronic components. These aircraft are updated and reconfigured at the speed of social media. Armed actors now constantly swap cutting-edge technical information, attack footage, and open-source drone code on public social media and monitor the other side’s attempts to do the same. These are critically important conversations that those tasked with protecting civilians from drones still all too often overlook, or encounter without the technical knowledge required to understand their implications.
The key players in drone warfare have changed, too. The United States is no longer the chief driver of development in weaponized drones, and small U. S. drones have made little impact on the battlefield in Ukraine, despite the hype-driven claims of certain U. S. defense companies. Combatants around the world increasingly look to nations such as Ukraine, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and China for tactical expertise and cutting-edge, relatively readily available drones, both in the cheap consumer and long-range military categories. Taken together, all of this means that those fighting against the abuse of drone technology cannot just attempt to appeal to U. S. and European weapons manufacturers: Drone makers and drone users are now exponentially more diffuse (and far more difficult to talk to) than they were in the recent past.
Finally, artificial intelligence and automation technology continue to advance at breakneck pace, and combatants around the world are actively working to integrate them into smaller, cheaper drones. In July, Ukrainians recovered the remains of a small fixed-wing Russian “Molniya” drone that had killed three civilians at a gas station: The drone was carrying a relatively inexpensive Nvidia minicomputer, which appears to have used computer vision software to lock in on its target. Pushing back on the misuse of AI in warfare must be a key focus for civilian protection from drones in the near future.
However, we say this with a caveat: Civilian defenders who focus too much on the dangers of AI drones risk missing the actual source of the problem. Worrisome as the prospect of increasingly automated drones in combat is, the vast majority of targeted drone attacks on civilians today are still carried out entirely manually by human pilots—humans who are knowingly choosing to kill and stalk civilian targets, from children to farmers to the elderly.
What can be done? To begin with, the arbiters of IHL must take a more active role in pushing back against the growing trend of drone attack impunity. The current crisis of attacks on civilians with drones is a grim mirror of the global rise of disregard for IHL and human life itself: Taking up the drone attack issue directly will help legal authority fight back against this wave of impunity and cruelty.
To support this goal, the International Committee of the Red Cross and associated legal experts should produce an updated Commentary to the Geneva Conventions, explicitly applying the law to modern drone warfare. The most recent manual on air warfare dates back to 2009, which is practically prehistoric in terms of modern drone timelines: Tall as the order is, it is time for IHL to learn to move more quickly in response. These legal clarifications should be accompanied by comprehensive public education and online messaging efforts in conflict areas, intended to help civilians at risk better understand how the law applies to drones.
The United Nations and the G-7 also need to put drone attacks on civilians at the top of the global agenda. The U. N. General Assembly should hold a high-level meeting focused specifically on the topic, and France, in its role as current president of the G-7, should call for the same. Such gatherings will help convey the seriousness of the drone attack problem to other global decision-makers and will get people with real leverage talking about what can be done about it.
To accompany these efforts, the U. N. should create a special reporting mechanism focused on drone attacks on civilians, which would report back either to the U. N. Security Council or to the U. N. General Assembly itself. This mechanism should be accompanied by the appointment of a special rapporteur, who would document and report on drone attacks to the body itself and to the world, within the authority of the United Nations.
Finally, there is no central organization focused specifically on collecting and technically analyzing information about small and novel drone attacks on civilians (although one of the authors has recently launched an effort at creating such a database resource here, and other organizations collect invaluable, but more general, information about drone attacks).
International aid organizations should support the creation of a dedicated center of expertise focused on tracking, analyzing, and mitigating the extraordinary proliferation of layered drone attacks on civilians around the world. At this center, drone experts would constantly monitor new tactical developments in conflicts around the world, ensuring that civilian protection is capable of keeping pace with the blistering rate of technological change. These experts would also work with local groups to create research-informed best practices and training programs for civilians subjected to drone warfare, drawing upon the hard-won expertise of people who have been forced to rapidly adapt to novel threats from the sky.
The center would work with forensic experts to create intuitive, easy-to-use ways for civilians and civil society to document drone attacks and collect comprehensive and well-validated evidence, with the hopeful goal of eventually being able to prosecute these attacks in international court. Finally, it would train new technical experts on civilian protection from drones, expanding the global roster of capable analysts.
Today, far too many civilians are facing the extreme physical and psychological dangers of life under attack-drone-filled skies, and if we continue on our current course, many more people will be forced to fear the high-pitched buzz of a hunting attack drone.
Faine Greenwood is an expert on unmanned aerial vehicles, technology in humanitarian aid, remote sensing, spatial data, and data policy and ethics. Greenwood's current research work centers on civilian drone technology and the new opportunities and operational and ethical challenges that drones and the spatial data that they collect presents to people affected by disaster and conflict.
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