“We are like a red rock for the enemy. Because we are taking the war to their territory so they feel it too,” says a Ukrainian soldier, as his unit assembles long-range drones for launch in Russia.
Ukraine has been intensifying its crackdown for weeks, targeting oil export facilities in particular, like never before.
Now, in a rare interview, the commander of all of Ukraine’s unmanned systems has told the BBC that such attacks will increase and claims that his drone army is also halting Russian advances on the frontline, killing a record number of soldiers.
“1,500 to 2,000 kilometers (930-1,240 miles) inside Russian territory is no longer a ‘peaceful rear,'” warns Robert Brovdi. “The freedom-loving Ukrainian ‘bird’ flies there whenever and wherever it wants.”
At a secret launch site, in a cold field in eastern Ukraine, long-range drones are primed and sent back to us at a safe distance. The team acts quickly before the Russian forces detect them and send ballistic missiles aimed at us. There’s a shouted command, the engine revs high and the first device as a flash of white tears into the sky like a mini jet towards Russia.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has called such deep strikes “very painful” for Moscow, which is costing its energy sector tens of billions of dollars in “significant” losses despite a recent rise in global oil prices.
The increase in such attacks is partly due to technology. Locally produced drones are getting cheaper and flying further: the model we launched can now travel more than 1,000 km and others can already go twice as far.
But it’s also about focus. In addition to military personnel and production, Russia’s energy exports have been identified as a priority target.
Ukraine has stepped up its offensive against Russia in recent weeks. The BBC went to see one such drone launch in eastern Ukraine [BBC]
“Putin extracts natural resources and converts them into blood dollars which they direct against us in the form of Shahad drones and ballistic missiles,” says Commander Brovdi, justifying the strikes.
Residents in Tuapse, on Russia’s Black Sea coast, complain of toxic rain after a second wave of major strikes at a local refinery in as many days. But Brovdi has dry eyes.
“If oil refineries are a money-making tool used for war, they are legitimate military targets, subject to destruction.”
The commander fights in the sky from a secret location deep underground. We were driven to meet him in a van with tinted windows, then descended a flight of stairs and emerged into a high-tech cave covered in floor-to-ceiling screens along corridors lined with sleeping pods.
The soundtrack is a series of bleeps and pings as fresh data is fed to dozens of men in T-shirts and hoodies hunched over joysticks and keyboards. They are monitoring images streamed directly from the battlefield from drone pilots with names like KitKat and Antalya.
Brovdi’s unmanned systems forces make up just 2% of Ukraine’s military, but today say they account for a third of all targets destroyed. Their own accident rate, he tells me, is no secret: less than 1% per year.
Every strike — of any kind — is filmed and logged for verification, and monitors on one wall display a detailed scorecard, updated in real time.
Over the past week, Brovdi has reported killing a dozen Russian FSB security service officers in the occupied territories as well as at several energy facilities in Russia. He argues that his forces are critical to denying Putin any headline victories, especially his goal of seizing the rest of the eastern Donbass region within months.
“What is he smoking?” Broadway Court. “It’s not realistic. It’s absurd.”
The command center is filled with artwork, a nod to Robert Browdy’s life before the war [BBC]
Four years ago, Robert Brody was more comfortable at auction houses like Christie’s than in the dirt pits. A fine-grain merchant in those days, side by side as an art collector, fragments of his pre-war life survive in paintings and sculptures by Ukrainian artists around the bunker. They are displayed next to missile casings and captured drones. He is an ethnic Hungarian from Uzhgorod in western Ukraine, and is best known by his military call sign, Magyar. Clean-shaven before the war, he now sports a long ginger and gray beard.
The businessman signed up to fight just before Russia’s full-scale invasion – “we all knew war was inevitable” – joining the territorial defense at first, then going through some of the fiercest battles, including Bakhmut.
But before that, pinned down by Russian fire in Kherson, he saw the drone’s potential for the first time. Brovdi recalled a device he bought for his children and began introducing similar devices to his unit. Suddenly they could climb over Russian positions and stream live images to nearby artillery teams, enabling them to strike. “The idea first evolved as self-preservation,” he explains, but it changed the battlefield.
Within months the soldiers were building their own drones and adding weapons, and soon became known as the 414th Brigade, Magyar’s Bird.
This drone can travel more than 1,000 km – others go further [BBC]
Brovdi’s strategy isn’t just about long-range strikes.
He talks, at length, about another priority: reducing Russia’s advantage in terms of manpower.
The issue has become more acute for Ukraine as it struggles to mobilize men for the front: “Those who want to fight are already fighting,” the commander admits.
His teams are therefore under direct orders to kill more enemy soldiers each month than Russia can recruit. That’s over 30,000 men a month.
“30% of all drone strikes should be against military personnel,” Brovdi clarifies. “You could call it a plan to kill, yes, and right now we’re going through it.”
He said that he has completed the target for four consecutive months.
I can’t confirm that data, but Brovdi tells me his people do exactly that: every soldier’s death must be verified by video, or it doesn’t count.
Some of those clips play on a terrifying loop on command center screens and Brovdi even posts them on Telegram, where he styles his drone troops as “birds” and their Russian prey as “insects” to hunt and destroy.
“The greatest mass killing of an enemy in the history of mankind is taking place in this very room,” he says at one point, gesturing to the screens around us.
It’s cruel, coming from a soft-spoken man, but Brovdi refuses to be “surprised by pity”.
Russian troops are beyond their own borders, he says, sent by Putin “who wants to destroy our nation”.
“If we don’t kill them, they kill us. That much is clear.”
Ukraine’s long-range drones have attacked an oil refinery in Tuapse, Russia. [Reuters]
The commander emphasized that he had no “rose-tinted glasses”: his goal was control, not mounting new counter-attacks or taking back large swaths of ground.
“We have an effective weapon: not to conduct an offensive war, but to prevent the enemy from advancing effectively on our land,” he told me.
He also believes that Vladimir Putin cannot end his attack, because the risk of failure is too great.
So Brovdi has another goal: Russian morale.
He expects the high casualty rate, combined with massive fires burning at facilities across the border, could create a “certain ferment” inside Russia. He aims for shock factor.
A recent video widely shared in Ukraine shows a Russian woman in Tuapse in floods of tears. “I wanted to be by the sea with my child, but everything is destroyed … those drones fly, destroy everything,” she cried, in the midst of grief.
For Brovdi, it’s a sign that the fallout from Russia’s aggression — and Ukraine’s strong push — could spread beyond its limited circles.
His aim, with every drone, is to make more Russians question the war their country is fighting and the president who started it.
Additional reporting by Sophie Williams, Volodymyr Lozhko and Anastasia Levchenko.
