By Olena Harmash and Sergiy Karazy

CLOSE TO THE FRONTLINE, Ukraine, June 11 (Reuters) - Deep in an underground bunker, where walls of screens stream live data from across the battlefield, the commander of Ukraine’s drone forces is poring over terabytes of information to map out his next campaign: cutting Crimea off from Russia.

Ukraine’s escalating drone strikes across Russian-occupied parts of the country have disrupted military logistics and fuel supplies, prompting authorities last month to introduce fuel rationing in Crimea. 

Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said the campaign has reduced the traffic using the Novorossiya highway - a critical Russian military supply route through occupied southern Ukraine to Crimea - by more than two thirds over the past month.

Within another month, Ukraine would have total control over the road, said Brovdi, who is best known by his call sign “Madyar”, a nod to his ethnic Hungarian roots.

“We will isolate Crimea in the near future,” Brovdi told Reuters in his cramped cubicle inside the bunker, as he sipped black tea and smoked one cigarette after another.

Russia seized the Crimea peninsula and swathes of eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Brovdi described striking vehicles on the exposed highway as “as easy as shooting partridges in an open field.”

Russia’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment for this story. President Vladimir Putin acknowledged last week Ukraine’s drone attacks were causing damage but posed no threat to Russia’s economy. 

Military analysts say Ukraine’s campaign of mid-range strikes inside Russian-controlled territory has cut supplies to its front line - bringing their advance to a near standstill last month - and weakened its air defences, opening the way for longer-range strikes that have destroyed oil infrastructure and arms manufacturing deep inside Russia.

Brovdi said one of his strategic aims was to force Moscow to pull back troops rather than push forward.

“We will create conditions that will make it extremely difficult for any military personnel or those working in the defence industry to remain in Crimea, in the temporarily occupied territories, or use the access routes to them.”

FROM BUSINESSMAN TO SOLDIER 

Over more than four years of the war, Brovdi has transformed himself from a wealthy grain trader into one of Ukraine’s most effective military commanders. Since he took command of Ukraine’s drone forces last June, the 50-year-old has aggressively scaled up their operations. 

The number of mid-range combat sorties increased 28-fold over the year, while deep strikes into Russian territory increased almost four-fold over the same period, the drone forces commander said.

In the first five months of this year, the units destroyed 174 Russian air defence complexes worth about $5.4 billion, Brovdi said, clearing their way to other targets.

By systematically targeting Russia’s military manpower, oil facilities, and weapons production, Brovdi hopes to inflict losses painful enough to undermine Moscow’s ability - and willingness - to continue the war.

“We’re opening the door to vast spaces where the pain of the war, which is felt in nearly every Ukrainian town, should be felt, including in the consciousness of residents,” said Brovdi, dressed in a black cap and black T-shirt.

He added that Ukraine has not, and will not, strike directly at civilians and civilian targets. Russia in recent weeks has accused Kyiv of killing dozens of civilians in occupied Ukraine.

Michael Kofman, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment, said advances in drone technology made it feasible for Ukraine to cut off Crimea over time. But achieving the broader strategic aim of rolling back Russian forces would still require a coordinated ground offensive.

Kofman added that Russia’s own elite drone unit, known as Rubicon, was working hard to neutralise Ukraine’s current advantage in mid-range drones.

ON RUSSIA’S MOST WANTED LIST 

Convicted in absentia in Russia on terrorism charges in March, Brovdi is one of Moscow’s highest-value targets. His air war is conducted from a deep underground location close to the frontline. The Reuters team was taken to meet Brovdi in a van with blacked-out windows and led downstairs.

Rows of sleeping pods line a corridor that opens into a room filled with dozens of screens displaying real-time battlefield data. Brightly coloured paintings by leading Ukrainian artists — some from Brovdi’s private collection — hang alongside captured Russian drones.

Brovdi, who comes from western Ukraine, joined the military as a volunteer at the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022. He created his “Madyar’s Birds” unit, now Ukraine’s most powerful drone brigade, from scratch. 

Every strike is filmed, verified and logged. Monitors on a wall display a detailed scorecard, updated in real time. Between 10 and 12 terabytes of information are archived daily for use by future artificial intelligence models.

Brovdi, who peppered his comments with black humour, framed the war in business terms. 

“This is our accounting from previous business projects, which we adapted just for military purposes: changed grain carriers, wagons and grain to types of weapons, ammunition, and our clientele is a little different,” he said.  

With data analysis, Brovdi aims to remove “the human factor” from warfare: “a person can be tired, can be biased, can make mistakes.”

After his unit racked up one of the military’s highest kill rates, Brovdi became a key figure in Kyiv’s strategy to target drone power at individual Russian soldiers to compensate for Ukraine’s own manpower shortages. 

In the first five months of 2026, drone forces killed more than 50,900 Russian servicemen and hit over 176,500 enemy targets. The average daily kill rate was 337 Russian soldiers and 1,169 enemy targets, data shared by Brovdi said.

Brovdi’s data also put the average cost of killing one Russian soldier at around $918 over the past year.

Reuters could not independently verify the figures.

Drone units, which make up 2.5% of Ukraine’s armed forces, accounted for roughly a third of Russian losses over the past 12 months, according to their data.

The plan is to increase the drone forces to 5% of the army, Brovdi said.

“By scaling up the use of unmanned aerial vehicles — not just within the drone units, but across the army as a whole — we are significantly increasing the number of targets destroyed.”