Ukraine’s most deadly combat arm, the drone forces, has kicked off a recruiting drive to increase its size from 15,000 to 30,000 pilots, maintenance crew and support personnel, said Maj. Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, the commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) in a Thursday statement.

Brovdi said the Ukrainian military’s USF branch is looking to fill thousands of vacancies with volunteers from the civilian sector, as well as with soldiers serving in another unit, soldiers convalescing and looking for a transfer, soldiers absent without leave from their old units, and reservists on the lam from the local military conscription committee.

“You are needed here, and right now. It’s time to quit running away from the army, it’s time for you go fly and drone strike the occupier [Russian troops on Ukrainian territory!]” Brovdi told potential recruits in a statement placed across media platforms.

Combat and rear area slots were open to anyone qualified and able to pass unit screening, and new USF members would be given contracts guaranteeing them a spot in a specific outfit or desired commander, USF recruiting materials reviewed by Kyiv Post said.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) in 2024 became the world’s first military to create of separate combat branch specializing in drone operations. The USF currently is, by a significant margin, the world’s biggest and most combat-experienced drone operations military unit.

USF recruiting materials reviewed by Kyiv Post stated a new recruit would receive full training in his or her specialty and be guaranteed a slot in a selected unit or under a specific commander. A common concern among many Ukrainian soldiers, particularly in line fighting units, is that high command might throw them into combat with insufficient support and resources, to head off a new emergency on the front. About 50 percent of the vacancies require job skills directly transferable from civilian jobs, a USF recruiting statement said.

Brovdi pitched hard the angle that although Ukraine overall is fighting a defensive war against Russia, the USF forces are not; in fact, they are taking the war to Russia and inflicting casualties on them. Ukrainians who want to be part of hitting the enemy and causing them pain should join the USF, he argued.

“Drones have become the main means for prosecuting war. We are cutting down worms [rude Ukrainian term for Russian soldiers] in industrial quantities. Their weapons have no chance. Their oil refineries are burning regularly. Gasoline in the swamps [rude Ukrainian term for “Russia”] is now a scarcity item. And their gas and oil burns very well,” Brovdi said.

“We are only two percent of the AFU. But every third verified Russian combat loss, was destroyed by the USF. Every third [rude word for Russian soldier dying in Ukraine] had his funeral song sung by a drone. And it’s going to be every second soldier. This is now a system. The system works. And everything that works should be scaled up,” he said.

An ethnic Hungarian from western Ukraine with no military education, Brovdi, 50, volunteered as a private infantryman following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, started a drone team financed by personal savings and donations, and over the next three years built an organization operating thousands of aircraft daily over distances greater than the European continent. Most military analysts credit Ukraine’s massed implementation of drones in 2023-24 for stopping major Russian offensives and inflicting massed casualties on Russian forces.

President Volodymyr Zelensky in June promoted Brovdi to command of all drone forces in the AFU. Once recruitment is complete, drone forces will have expanded from two to five percent of total uniformed membership in the AFU – according to open sources around 600,000 men and women. The primary mission of the USF will be to create an impenetrable buffer zone protecting Ukrainian troops from Russian attacks, with a secondary mission of conducting long-range strikes against targets inside Russia, he said.

In pre-war civilian life, Brovdi was a successful Uzhhorod-based businessman with interests in commodity grain trading. He has enforced on drone units under his command an uncharacteristically rigorous (for-the-AFU) standard of accounting and results-tracking, and set precedents by placing kill counts and hit confirmation videos online.

The latest USF numbers, for Thursday, reported USF drones in the past 24 hours had scored 938 confirmed hits on Russian army personnel and equipment, of which 273 were strikes killing 146 and wounding 127 Russian soldiers. According to that data, strikes concentrated on Russian drone control antennae and support equipment, drones in the air, and light vehicles such as automobiles and motorcycles. Russian heavy weapons losses to USF drones reported for the day included 2 tanks, 4 armored personnel carriers and 19 artillery pieces, daily figures published by USF showed.

In the Russian border town of Shebekino, USF forces dropped printed leaflets with pictures of Brovdi and the statement, with the words “One drone for every wormy snout” (Ukrainian: Дрон для кожного червивого морди. In the Ukrainian drone forces, “worm” is a common derogatory term for a Russian foot soldier seen from the air.) According to Oct. 30 Shebekino-based social media, some leaflets dropped on the Russian town included QR codes to USF fundraising sites.

Russia’s Sputnik International in early June aired a profile dedicated to Brovdi headlined “Nazi Conman With a Rap Sheet: Zelensky’s Drone Chief Pick.” In July Dmitry Rogozin, former head of Roscosmos and a leading Kremlin propagandist, in a X post complained of the flood of graphic USF videos released to the internet showing Ukrainian drones hunting down and killing individual Russian soldiers with explosives.

“Madyar is a talented military commander and organizer, but an absolute traitor and maniac. They are making videos showing how they tear apart each of our soldiers with 3-4 kamikaze drones,” Rogozin said. In October Russia’s Kremlin-controlled State Investigative Committee opened an investigation into allegations Brovdi might be prosecuted under Russian law as a war criminal.

Brovdi in Sept. 24 comments on Rogozin’s charges said to a Ukrainian reporter: “I don’t know why I deserve this kind of attention, but I want to say that today we’ve ‘done in’ 212 of their [Russian Federation] soldiers, and we’re not finished, we still have the whole night ahead of us.”

Ukraine’s Army General Staff in late July opened a long-range bombardment campaign targeting Russian energy infrastructure like oil refineries, fuel storage sites and electric power stations. The USF’s secretive extreme-long-range drone operations unit – the 1st Center of Unmanned Systems Forces (1CUSF) – has carried out the lion’s share of the strikes.

According to an unofficial Kyiv Post count of long-range Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian energy infrastructure since July 31, the Ukrainian military has executed at least 100 major drone attacks, hitting some refineries as often as 4 times. Independent market watch groups usually estimate the drone attacks have destroyed or taken off-line about one-fifth of Russian Federation oil processing capacity.