Robert Brovdy

Robert Brovdy comes from the city of Uzhhorod, in the far west of Ukraine near the border with Hungary, which is the origin of his nickname.[4]

Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brovdy was a successful businessman in the field of agriculture.[4]

In January 2019, a bag of grenades was thrown into the backyard of Brovdy's father's house in Storozhnytsya. Police opened an investigation into the attack, but were unable to identify a perpetrator.[5] Early in the morning of February 16, a similar attack occurred, with an unknown person firing a grenade launcher at Brovdy's mother's house. The grenade, fired from a hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher, pierced the outer wall of the house and several inner walls, eventually stopping in the wall of the bedroom where Brovdy's mother was sleeping. She was not injured.[6]

Shortly before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brovdy joined the Territorial Defence Forces of Ukraine, where he was assigned to a command platoon.[7] During the Kyiv offensive, he took part in the evacuation of civilians from Irpin during the battle for the city, and took part in fighting in Bucha and Borodianka.[7][4] In late April, his unit was sent to the frontline in the Kherson direction of the southern campaign.[7][4]

After some time, Brovdy decided that he could be doing more with his entrepreneurial skills instead of "sitting in a sodden trench".[4] Against bureaucratic procedure,[7] he raised funds on his own to buy a "fleet of drones", with which he set up the aerial reconnaissance unit "Madyar's Birds", which was absorbed into the Ukrainian 28th Mechanized Brigade.[4] The unit is composed of "a few dozen" pilots, with hundreds of drones.[2] Like much of the Ukrainian army, the drones used by the unit are the Chinese-made civilian DJI Mavics.[8][9] The unit is involved in five primary types of drone reconnaissance: locating enemy forces, patrolling the frontline, artillery spotting, attacks with kamikaze drones, and occasionally dropping explosive devices on enemy soldiers.[7][4]

Magyar's Birds took part in the Battle of Bakhmut[2] until March 2023, when Brovdy said in a video posted to social media that the unit had been ordered to withdraw after "110 days" of fighting.[3]

Madyar's Birds often releases videos of their "greatest successes" on the battlefield, which feature Russian soldiers dying, which journalists have described as having "undoubtable propaganda value".[8][10] Brovdy has become a popular figure in Ukraine among "war-watchers" on social media for his "salty analogies and metaphors shrouded in black humor" and "colorful western Ukrainianisms" in his narration of videos he publishes of his unit's activities.[4]