“We Will Isolate Crimea in the Near Future,” Ukraine’s Drone Forces Commander Explains How

Ukraine's drone forces are waging a campaign to cut the supply lines between occupied Crimea and Russia, their commander revealed in an exclusive interview with Reuters on June 11.

Robert Brovdi, commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces and known by his call sign "Madyar," detailed the effort to Reuters from a deep underground bunker near the front line.

The Novorossiya highway, a critical Russian supply route through temporarily occupied southern Ukraine, sits at the center of the effort.

Brovdi reported that strikes had cut its traffic by more than two-thirds over the past month, with total control expected within another month. He likened picking off the exposed vehicles to "shooting partridges in an open field."

The campaign threatens Russia's ability to hold and resupply the peninsula it seized in 2014.

We will isolate Crimea in the near future

Robert Brovdi

Commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces

He intends to make it untenable for Russian troops and defense-industry workers to remain on the peninsula or to use the routes leading in.

The squeeze has already forced occupation authorities to ration fuel across Crimea last month. Military analysts told Reuters that the mid-range strikes have choked Russia's front-line supplies, stalling its advance, while wearing down its air defenses.

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The Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, acknowledged last week that the attacks were causing damage but posed no threat to Russia's economy.

Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment noted that drone advances make isolating Crimea feasible over time, though rolling back Russian forces would still demand a coordinated ground offensive. He added that Russia's elite Rubicon drone unit is working to erode Ukraine's current edge in mid-range strikes.

The commander behind Ukraine’s expanding drone war

A wealthy grain trader before the war, Brovdi volunteered at the start of Russia's 2022 invasion and built his "Madyar's Birds" unit into Ukraine's most powerful drone brigade. Since taking command of the drone forces last June, the 50-year-old has scaled mid-range combat sorties 28-fold over the year.

The units he leads account for just 2.5% of Ukraine's armed forces, yet inflict roughly a third of Russia's losses, a share he aims to double to 5%.

That record has made Brovdi one of Moscow's highest-value targets, and a Russian court convicted him in absentia on terrorism charges in March. He directs the air war from a concealed underground site where every strike is filmed, verified, and logged.

The war as accounting

Brovdi frames the war in the language of his old trade. "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 stated.

His own figures put the cost of killing one Russian soldier at roughly $918 over the past year. In the first five months of 2026, by his count, the drone forces killed more than 50,900 Russian servicemen and destroyed 174 air defense complexes worth about $5.4 billion.

That pressure on Crimea's overland links has been building for weeks. Days earlier, drone fire control over the Mariupol–Berdiansk–Melitopol–Simferopol corridor had cut cargo traffic by 71% in two weeks, with daily vehicle flow falling from 3,800 to 1,100. Russia's Vostok grouping responded by banning military cargo on the R-280 Novorossiya and A-291 Tavrida highways from June 7, ordering its troops onto bypass roads.

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