Robert “Madyar” Brovdi’s underground command post features walls of blinking screens playing footage of Ukrainian drones attacking Russian troops, frontline maps, and scoreboards of destroyed targets. The drone attacks that the grey-bearded 50-year-old oversees from the bunker -- in a secret location in Ukraine -- are recorded and analyzed, for him to develop strategies to stop the Russian invasion.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The secretive and unlikely head of Ukraine’s unmanned systems forces, whose recent strikes have embarrassed the Kremlin, grumbles that he does not like interviews, but his face lights up when the conversation turns to maths and war. “Numbers are the foundation of war. Everything starts there. Anyone who ignores this cannot play this game. They will be followers rather than leaders,” Brovdi told AFP. Better known by his call-sign of Madyar, Brovdi was a wealthy grain trader with no military background when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. He volunteered to fight, then set up his own drone unit -- “Madyar’s Birds” -- well before many had realized the full importance of the technology, and quickly earned plaudits within the military. Zelensky appointed him in June 2025 to command the army’s overall unmanned systems forces. His path reflects how Ukraine has leveraged innovation to fight Russia’s more conventionally powerful army. “I simply brought my accounting system with me to the war. We took the names of grain varieties from the table and entered the types of drones and ammunition there,” he told AFP.