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.
- Feb- Mar 2022: ‘Madyar’s Birds’ an informal Drone Unit formed.
- Nov 2022- The group is enlarged to a company. ’Unmanned Combat Aircraft Systems Company (RUBAK) of the 59th Separate Assault Brigade (59th OMPBr).
- Jan 2024: Reorganised as an independent military unit in the form of a separate battalion (414 OBUBAS) of the Ukrainian Marine Corps’ unmanned attack aviation systems.
- Jun 2024: The battalion is reflagged as a regiment.
- Current Status- Designated as the 414th Attack UAV Brigade (414 OPUBAS).
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:
- By January 16, 2024, as reported by Robert Brovdi the unit had fought for 692 days (now 1241 and counting) in the battlefields of Kherson, Krynky (Kherson region), Soledar, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Mariinka (Donetsk region), and Urozhayne (Zaporizhzhia region).
- In February this year, Brovdi’s unit recorded 1,309 injured or killed Russian soldiers, in March 1,848, in April 1,804 and in May 2,221.
- The value of the Russian military equipment they destroyed is estimated at over one billion dollars.
- 16 soldiers of the ‘Birds of Madyar’ awarded the “Knights of the Order of Courage”.
“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.