When legends are born!

“Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years.”- Stephen King

Authors

This is the story of the making of a legend. Robert Yosypovych Brovdi (DOB 09 August 1975), call sign Madyar, is a volunteer in Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Force.

He joined as a Platoon Commander in the 206th Battalion of the 241st Territorial Defence Brigade in February 2022. As a trench man holding the line in Kiev, he bought a commercial DJI drone to reconnoitre his forward defences. Quickly grasping the advantages that tactical access to the third dimension brings to the battlefield, he scaled up and refined the Tactics, Techniques and Practices (TTPs), co-opting drones into “attack drones, electronic intelligence and warfare systems, remote drone mining, patrolling and fire adjustment tasks, and deep reconnaissance.”

His ingenuity in scaling up a conceptual understanding into operational advantage through adaptive organisational structures is evident in the subunit’s meteoric rise. The evolution timelines are below.

The unit, structured for battlefield adaptability, now boasts of sub-unit for the interception and destruction of drones, a sub-unit for experimental unmanned systems and a sub-unit for the development and implementation of new systems.

This Band of Brothers and their Bees have impressive and formidable achievements to their credit. Their forte is the cost-effective imposition of prohibitive costs. Their Victory Markers include:

“Madyar has set an ambitious target of 100 injured or killed Russian soldiers per day for his brigade.” This legend sure has a series of ‘five-minute’ episodes over a thousand days of war fighting, where courage is laced with imagination.