The electronic hum in the sky above told him that the Russians were on a hunting safari, and that he was the prey. Leaping from his bicycle, Oleksandr left its wheels spinning as he bolted through a hole in a fence hoping to find cover.

Horrified to discover he was still in the open air, he threw himself against the fence, hoping to blend in, to somehow hide. The drone tracked sideways, hung above him, and dropped its bomb.

The explosion tore a chunk of his leg away.

“He was hovering above me. I had a feeling that he was playing a computer game, dropping bombs on peaceful civilians,” Oleksandr Sensky said from the hospital where he is recovering in Kherson.

As he tore into the medical bag, which he carried as a Red Cross volunteer in Kherson, he knew he was still being watched by the drone pilots across the Dnipro river, less than a mile away.

As he scrabbled in the dirt fixing a tourniquet on his leg, the thought struck him that maybe they were high-fiving their friends or jeering as he struggled.

Kherson was liberated from Russia in November 2022. Since then it has been shelled, mortared, rocketed, and bombed every day. Now it is also contending with being a target-practice area for Russian drone pilots who post videos of their “hunting trips” onto Telegram.

The use of drones has turned a viciously impersonal mission to kill civilians in this southern Ukrainian city into a darkly personal campaign of murder. If ever there was a town in desperate need of a ceasefire, this is it. But no one here says they believe one is remotely possible.

Russian forces occupy the east bank of the Dnipro which is about 500m wide in the city. Their snipers and gunners can see targets with the naked eye. Drone pilots can see in live feeds of the terrified run and trip, the horror in the eyes, and then the final moments of their victims. They drop bombs, or swoop on them with First Person View (FPV) aircraft drones, that can loiter out of sight and dart in for the kill.

For three years, Kherson has been frightening. Now its population remains behind closed doors and drawn curtains as deadly drones target buses, trams, cars and shoppers. To be on the street is to risk the hunters’ eye.

Lives are ended above ground. Underground now, at least, they can begin in safety.

Ukraine has opened the first bespoke bomb-proof maternity hospital by abandoning the surface facility for its basement. The city has also opened an underground surgical hospital and has plans for seven more. It’s taking every one of its hospitals and, to avoid the Russian killing games, turning them upside down.

Dr Petro Marenkovskyi is head of the new obstetrics department in the old Kherson Maternity Hospital. His medical work is now two floors down in what were cellars. The spotless corridors lead to shining new delivery rooms, an operating theatre, an intensive care unit – all the facilities that were abandoned above ground are protected now by blast-proof doors, like on a submarine.

The day before The Independent visits, Kherson was hit by nine bombs dropped by Russian jets which killed two people. Another five were injured in drone attacks. As the killing continues, so the urgency to reproduce, as an act of defiance, intensifies.

“With the current demographics situation in our country, we are fighting for every newborn – for every woman who should give birth here in Kherson,” says Dr Marenkovskyi. The hospital used to see about 1,500 to 2,000 births a year – now it’s around 120.

There has been a surge in the proportion of women needing C-section deliveries, with high blood pressure and complicated births.

“Every child born here is now golden,” adds Dr Oksana Ivanivna.

As she talks, there’s a muffled thump. Another detonation on the surface. More dead? More maimed? In the maternity hospital, no one reacts.

Dr Ivanivna’s home was destroyed a few months ago. The hospital was hit by rockets twice in 2023, and again last year. Most of the doctors here have lived inside the building for the last two years. In Kherson, only outsiders flinch at the sound of explosions.

Olha Viner is lying on a bed in the pre-natal section of the bunker hospital. She’s being monitored for high blood pressure and doctors say, a month from her due date, her baby is at grave risk.

“I think everyone has high blood pressure in Kherson,” she jokes.

While new lives are emerging, the elderly of Kherson have shown staggering fortitude. The city once housed about 250,000 people. It endured eight months of Russian occupation, a violent liberation and is now a target-rich zone of Russians hoping to kill civilians as 83,000 people still live here. Five thousand are children.

Iryna Voskova has nine grandchildren. She jokes that she has given herself a new nickname because she had a titanium plate as part of her skull and a piece of metal shrapnel lodged in her brain.

“I have a souvenir. The fragment remained in my head. It can’t be removed. And here they put a platinum plate, to cover the hole. I am an Iron Lady,” she says with a chuckle.

These injuries were from when she was hit by a mortar fired across the river into the Kherson suburb of Atonivka in 2023, which was after her son’s home was obliterated by a Russian bomb, but before the drones came and did yet more damage in the summer of last year.

“The drones were constantly flying at that time. People tried to hide under trees or in houses.

“But it’s not always possible to hide in time. Drones are hunting people, cars, buses. My son was hit when he was walking home from the bus after work. Drones are following the buses.

“Probably all the buses in Antonivka are already damaged by dozens of attacks on the transport system and on bus stops,” she says.

Volodymyr, her son who is 48, was hit in the abdomen. He has a damaged liver and his gall bladder was removed but he survived.

The house they now all shared at the time did not.

“A drone dropped incendiary munition on our house. It was October 2, 2024. My neighbors called me to say our house was on fire. The two-storey house burned to the ground. Only the charred ground floor walls remained,” says Iryna.

Irina, like almost everyone else in Kherson, is deeply sceptical of talk of a ceasefire.

“Putin cannot be trusted,” she says. “He always betrays, always lies. So it is very difficult to believe that this will happen. But we hope for it. Very much. And we are very grateful to everyone who is trying to help us.”

The military mayor of Kherson, Roman Mrochko, was close to an air strike which narrowly missed his offices the day before. He is adamant that the Ukrainian military intelligence has evidence that Russian drone pilots are training on his civilian population.

“We now have a saying — it’s a true ‘safari’. It’s a real hunt for civilians. The Russian Federation is sending new units here. They learn to fly drones, dropping explosives on our civilians, cars, buses, trolleybuses. These people are training, learning. In a few months, they are sent to the Eastern Ukraine front.

“Then new units arrive and continue to train on our civilians,” he insists.

When asked about the claim that the Russians could be training their FPV pilots on civilians in Kherson, he replies: “We have intercepted conversations between them.

“And just look at the figures. Already this year, we have 391 injured, including 39 children, and 40 killed, including four children.

“And if we look at the videos of how they drop the explosives from the drones: a bus stop, or they drop the explosives on the civilian buses, on their route, transporting people home, to work, or to the market…. where there are no soldiers at all”.

Back in Kherson’s underground Maternity Hospital, Alina Stasiuk is holding her daughter Adelina who is not quite a day old – and in perfect health.

Reflecting on how it feels to give birth to a baby in a city where Russians constantly use bombs and drones, she replies: “Of course, it’s a little scary, but it’s worth it, to be honest.

“It’s happiness… Giving birth is happiness, and it’s just a piece of happiness you hold in your arms.”