EASTERN UKRAINE — The commander leading Ukraine’s drone war says his country’s recent strikes in Crimea are the first phase of a campaign aimed at rendering the peninsula -- illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 -- unusable as a staging ground for Russian forces. Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, one of Ukraine’s most prominent commanders among a new generation of soldiers, said his forces could strike seven times more military targets in Crimea if the money pledged by Western allies came faster. “Crimea falls within the key conceptual pillars on the path to ending the war,” Brovdi told The Associated Press in an interview. Despite that shortfall, Ukraine’s summer campaign in Crimea has already inflicted significant damage: striking rail bridges, oil depots and power infrastructure to disrupt supply lines and blind Russian air defences as drones fly in. Brovdi said his forces are equipped at just 14 per cent of what they would need to carry out the Crimea campaign at full capacity. A firm believer in numbers since his past life running an international grain trading business, Brovdi joined Ukraine’s territorial defence as a volunteer in the war’s opening days. He rose quickly, commanding one of the country’s most effective drone brigades before being tapped to lead a force with no precedent before this war -- Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. “It’s not that the production capacity of Ukrainian manufacturers doesn’t allow us to make the necessary quantities” of drones, Brovdi said. “It’s the banal problem of untimely financing, which our partners do allocate, but which moves significantly slower than our plans.” A lover of the arts A devoted patron of the arts, Brovdi’s underground command post resembles a museum, with pieces of Ukrainian art on display, including by renowned painter Maria Prymachenko -- each with small placards noting their titles and a QR code linking to more information. “Please don’t touch the sculpture,” reads a sign beneath one piece. The artwork sits against a backdrop of dozens of screens streaming live footage from the front, along with real-time data that drives decisions on the battlefield. Soldiers can grab good coffee, pick a book, work out or rest in sleeping pods -- a culture that feels closer to a Silicon Valley office than a war room. They work around the clock to try to prevent Crimea from functioning as a staging ground for the Russian military, said Brovdi, whose call sign, Magyar, nods to his ethnic Hungarian roots in Zakarpattia, the western Ukrainian region bordering Hungary. He pointed to one sign of progress -- in four recent large-scale Russian missile barrages from the peninsula, only five missiles were launched in total, a drop he credited to the systematic destruction of Russian air defences there. The AP couldn’t independently verify the claim. To open that “window” for drones to strike the peninsula without being shot down en masse, his forces destroyed more than 300 air defence assets over recent months -- surface-to-air systems, radar stations, electronic warfare equipment. The window metaphor sends him into a sidetrack about something personal -- he loves sleeping with one open, a pleasure he rarely gets anymore as one of Russia’s most hunted men, who spends most of his time in underground bunkers. Forcing Russia out of Crimea Much of Russia’s Soviet-era air defence hardware runs on the power grid, which is one of the reasons Crimea’s electrical infrastructure has become a recurring target. Russian soldiers become “blind,” left with just machine guns and rifles, he said. The tactic has also impacted access to power for civilians, and Brovdi said he has twice publicly apologized to Ukrainians living in Crimea for the disruptions. Wherever Starlink connectivity reaches across Crimea, his forces can now destroy even the most heavily defended target using an average of just three drones, mixing munitions with different characteristics and warheads depending on what’s being hit. He described the strikes as deliberately calibrated -- different munitions for a bridge pier than for a fuel truck or a moving train -- and said his forces avoid hitting civilian infrastructure. “Creating conditions that make it impossible for any kind of military capability … to remain there will make Crimea uninteresting ... as a military staging ground,” he said. Ukraine is also working to dismantle Crimea’s role as a naval base -- a blow to Russia’s presence near NATO’s borders, he added. The campaign’s early results have not been made public, Brovdi said. But roughly two weeks into the offensive that began in late June, he said Ukrainian intelligence indicated Russian authorities had ordered all military commands and security services to relocate off the peninsula, along with a covert order to remove secret archives and artworks. The AP could not independently verify the account. Threats from Russia Meanwhile, Russia is working to counter Ukraine’s edge. It is installing jamming systems at a scale that will, to some degree, degrade Starlink connectivity, Brovdi said. Russia is also building its own satellite communications system to rival Starlink, he said. “This is a risk for the entire planet,” Brovdi said, “because a dictatorship will gain access to information across the whole globe.” He also pointed to other threats facing Ukraine. The concentration of jet-powered Shahed drones, which are much harder for Ukraine to shoot down, has increased two and a half times in recent weeks, he said. Russia’s military can currently fire a simultaneous salvo of 77 ballistic and cruise missiles, he said, and plans to increase that to 200. That is one of Ukraine’s most vulnerable points, since the country is running short of interceptors for the U.S.-made Patriot -- the only system Ukraine has in its arsenal against ballistic missiles -- meaning dozens fired by Russia during mass barrages get through and hit their targets. “Even if they only manage half of that, it will all be flying at us,” Brovdi said. The only way to bring the number down, he said, is by striking every facility involved in producing those missiles -- underscoring the importance of Ukraine’s long-range strikes deep inside Russian territory. Ukraine’s plan for Russia’s Wildberries Ukraine has increasingly targeted Wildberries, Russia’s largest online marketplace sometimes described as the country’s answer to Amazon, and Brovdi named it as a target. “Wildberries is, first of all, a supply platform -- it’s the war’s quartermaster,” he said, noting the company runs a dedicated section selling goods for Russia’s military. At the same time, he said, the strikes on the retail chain are meant to make ordinary Russians feel the war directly, in hopes the resulting desire to end it could weigh on Russia’s ability to keep fighting. Brovdi declined to give a timeline for the Wildberries campaign, saying only that the strikes will continue “until it becomes impossible for it to recover quickly.” “Ultimately, Wildberries is, forgive the expression, a consumer gambling addiction,” he said, arguing that losing access to it -- like restrictions on social media -- creates an intrusion on one’s personal life that most Russians feel. “It turned out to be a sensitive sensor of the comfort of Russia’s massive population -- people who consider themselves completely untouched by the actions of the aggressor country,” he said. ___ AP reporters Vasilisa Stepanenko in eastern Ukraine and Volodymyr Yurchuk in Kyiv contributed. Hanna Arhirova, The Associated Press
