The drivers risking death on Ukraine's most dangerous bus routes

Anatoly Dmytrov was driving his bus on Route 14 in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson earlier this month.

The bus was full and people were standing in the aisle, when it reached an intersection and it was hit by a Russian drone.

"All the windows got smashed. I barely made it to the next stop, where there was a shelter. I looked in the mirror and saw blood. I thought - oh, I need to get to the shelter quickly because sometimes they send a second drone immediately," Anatoly said.

He was in shock after the attack, and at least eight of his passengers were injured, he added.

"It's no fun working here," Anatoly said. "This happens almost every day, they've started hunting buses down. You go to work and you have no idea if you are going to come home."

Kherson's municipal transport company, where Anatoly works, says the attacks started last year and are getting worse. Public transport has become a priority target for Russian drone operators, the company said in a statement shared with the BBC.

This year alone, three of its workers have been killed, eight wounded, and 21 of its trolleybuses and eight buses damaged. Local authorities say six privately operated buses have been hit in 2026, too.

About 65,000 people are still thought to be in Kherson, a city of some 300,000 residents before the war.

The city is firmly under Ukrainian control and yet it is the administrative centre of one of the five Ukrainian regions which Russia claims as its own.

It was occupied by the Russians in the first few days of the full-scale invasion of 2022, then retaken by the Ukrainians in autumn of the same year, and since then has been relentlessly attacked by Russian forces from across the Dnipro river.

Rita Dobrinova, a manager at the Kherson municipal transport company, believes the threat from Russian drones is getting worse, particularly since they started using optic fibre cables, which are immune to jamming.

"Some are just hovering, waiting. Others are scout drones. They look the driver right in the eye through the windscreen," she said.

"There is a bus driver who had a bomb dropped literally on to his head on 11 April. It went through the cabin's roof and fell on his head," she recalled of one fatal attack.

Authorities in Kherson have taken steps to protect bus drivers and their passengers. Some of the busiest streets are covered with anti-drone nets protecting pedestrians and traffic underneath, and authorities say drivers are given helmets and bullet-proof vests.

They were also issued with drone detectors, called chuyka, but they are of limited use.

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