Robert Brovdi

Robert Brovdi 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, Brovdi was a successful businessman in the field of agriculture.[4] He also headed the Zakarpattia regional branch of the public organization Front for Change for some time.[5] Since the autumn of 2010, he served as director of the corporation Bread Investbud, which strained his relations with Front for Change and particularly its leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk due to revelations about Bread Investbud having links to then-Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin.[5] He was completely expelled from Front for Change in April 2015, with local media reporting that his actions had led to the collapse of public support for the organization in his native Zakarpattia region.[6]

In January 2019, a bag of grenades was thrown into the backyard of Brovdi's father's house in the Storozhnytsia district of Uzhhorod. Police opened an investigation into the attack, but were unable to identify a perpetrator.[7] Early in the morning of February 16, a similar attack occurred, with an unknown person firing a grenade launcher at Brovdi'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 Brovdi's mother was sleeping. She was not injured.[8]

Shortly before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brovdi joined the Territorial Defence Forces of Ukraine, where he was assigned to a command platoon.[9] 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.[9][4] In late April, his unit was sent to the frontline in the Kherson area of the southern campaign.[9][4]

After some time, Brovdi decided that he could be doing more with his entrepreneurial skills instead of "sitting in a sodden trench".[4] Against bureaucratic procedure,[9] 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.[10][11] 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.[9][4]

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

In April 2023, Brovdi warned that the Chinese government may cut off Ukrainian military access to the Mavic drones, and urged Ukrainian soldiers to be careful with the drones they had.[12]

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".[10][13] Brovdi 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]

He was awarded the medal "For the Defense of Ukraine" by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on 28 August 2023.[14]