Russian FPV drone strike kills priest at Kherson monastery; four clergy wounded

Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, said Russian forces struck a monastery in the village of Chervonyi Maiak, in the Novoraisk community of Kherson Oblast, with a first-person-view drone at about 3 p.m. on September 19, 2026, Ukrinform and Ukrainska Pravda reported. Prokudin, as quoted by Ukrinform, said the FPV strike killed a 71-year-old priest. Those accounts said four other priests — aged 31, 51, 51, and 53 — were wounded. Ukrainska Pravda said early reports described blast and shrapnel injuries; Ukrinform said they were preliminarily reported as blast injuries. Opened wires carried Prokudin’s account as those outlets reported it and did not include a Russian statement.

The Kherson eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), as reported by the Union of Orthodox Journalists (SPZH), named the site St. Gregory’s Monastery in Chervonyi Mayak, in the Novovorontsovsk vicariate, and said the oldest resident, monk Moses, was seriously injured in a first unmanned-aerial-vehicle strike on the monastery grounds and later died. The eparchy, SPZH said, also described a later strike the same day: after a lull, monks set out on foot toward a neighboring village and were hit again, wounding four more members of the community. Metropolitan John of Kherson and Tavria asked prayers for the recovery of Archimandrite Kuksha and novices Oleksandr, Oleh, and Oleksandr, SPZH reported. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy separately said, Ukrinform reported, that Russian forces had struck a men’s monastery in the Kherson region with an FPV drone the previous day, killing one member of the clergy and injuring four others.

The opened accounts do not line up on every detail. Prokudin’s report, as carried by Ukrinform and Ukrainska Pravda, describes one FPV strike and calls the dead a priest. The UOC Kherson eparchy, via SPZH, describes more than one strike — including an attack on clergy evacuating on foot — and names the dead as monk Moses. Those remain two attributed descriptions of the same reported incident, not a reconciled official record.