Robert "Madyar" Brovdi spent his pre-war years brokering grain deals and rubbing shoulders with the wealthy at London auction houses. Now the 50-year-old ethnic Hungarian from Ukraine's western borderlands commands the country's unmanned forces and oversees a system that has killed or incapacitated thousands of Russian soldiers, "Hvylya" reports, citing a profile in The Economist.

Brovdi's first breakthrough came in the summer of 2022 on the Kherson front. Ukrainian forces were outgunned and blind - they had no idea where Russian fire was coming from. Brovdi, still an inexperienced soldier, remembered a drone he had bought his son on a business trip in Asia and had several brought to the trenches. They were crude but good enough to spot hidden Russian tanks. He began passing coordinates to a nearby artillery brigade over Discord, a social media app. It was Ukraine's first drone kill chain.

A year later, in Bakhmut, the concept evolved. A colleague known as Klym had a friend who raced first-person-view drones competitively. The team suggested these fast, agile machines could carry small munitions. They began hanging water-filled condoms from trees and trying to hit them with drones, then moved to taping American MK-19 grenades to the frames. This became the foundation of a reconnaissance-and-strike "line of drones" kill-zone concept Brovdi later championed to offset Ukraine's infantry shortage.

The business background carried over directly into warfare. Every mission - whether a drone strike or an electronic-warfare session - is now logged and verified by video, then fed into business-intelligence software Brovdi repurposed from his grain-trading days. "The principles are the same," he told The Economist. "I asked my guys to swap grain type, tonnage and truck numbers for weapons, shifts and ammunition."

The results speak for themselves. Brovdi's brigade, "Madyar's Birds," claims a sixth of all verified Russian losses. His wider unmanned-forces grouping now delivers a disproportionate share of battlefield damage relative to its tiny footprint in the Ukrainian army. Since the start of winter, drone-inflicted casualties have outpaced Russian recruitment for the first time in the war.

Previously: From Peasant Farmers to Cossacks: How Four Years of War Transformed the Ukrainian Male.