Drones Are Mathematics: What Ukraine’s Drone Commander Wants NATO to Understand

In April 2022, Robert Brovdi was defending the Kherson sector with 27 men, pinned down by Russian artillery and unable to see enemy positions. An old-school commander told him drones were nonsense and sent his team to scout the gullies on foot.

Four years later, Brovdi — known by his call sign “Magyar” — is a Hero of Ukraine and commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces, a full branch of Ukraine’s armed forces. His original unit, “Magyar’s Birds,” assembled one of Ukraine’s first FPV strike drones in August 2022. He was one of the commanders who turned FPV drones from an experiment into a primary weapon of the war.

This month, Brovdi gave a rare interview to Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT from a secret command post. His message to NATO was blunt: the Alliance is not ready for drone warfare. At DK NEJET, we agree with the core of what he said, and we believe these principles are what can actually guarantee a country’s population a strong defence. Here are the points every defence planner and investor should hear.

“The plague of the third millennium”

Brovdi calls drones the plague of the third millennium, and he insists this is not a metaphor but a matter of mathematics. In August alone, Russia launched an average of roughly 300 Shahed-type drones at Ukraine every day. In his view, no army in the world is currently equipped to absorb attacks on that scale.

His sharpest warning is aimed at NATO’s eastern flank. There will never be another “Kyiv in three days,” he says — but he is not sure the same can be said of the Baltic states. NATO countries, he argues, underestimate how ready Russia is to fight with modern technology, and Moscow knows the Alliance has not yet settled on a clear answer to the drone threat.

The good news: some allies are listening. In a separate interview published on 27 September, Brovdi said four NATO countries are already quietly designing their own Unmanned Systems Forces, modelled on Ukraine’s. His advice to them: first do it, then talk about it.

Drones have rewritten the doctrine of war

According to Brovdi, unmanned systems have effectively taken over the roles of entire military branches: artillery, aviation and armour. Traditional equipment can no longer reach firing positions in time. Inside the “kill zone” — the strip of front line under constant drone observation — a tank or howitzer becomes an easy target.

The numbers from the front back him up:

• About 90% of confirmed hits. Drones now account for roughly nine in ten confirmed hits on Russian forces, per Ukraine’s Defence Ministry.
• Over 1 million verified hits by drone units in the first half of 2026, with June alone passing 200,000.
• Around 11,000 drone sorties a day. In March 2026, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief reported 151,207 targets struck by drones in a single month.
• From 3,000 to millions. Ukraine built roughly 3,000–5,000 FPV drones in 2022. By 2025 it was about 3 million, and by early 2026 industry capacity exceeded 8 million a year.

Drones have also made the battlefield transparent. Reconnaissance UAVs fly in a continuous “carousel,” so movements, logistics, and the enemy’s intentions are visible in real time and well in advance. Surprise, the oldest advantage in war, is now very hard to achieve.

The cost asymmetry no budget can survive

A drone costing a few hundred dollars can destroy a tank worth millions. The same logic runs in reverse against defenders. Brovdi’s example: shooting down $50,000 drones with $4 million Patriot interceptors will eventually bankrupt any nation.

Russia understands this and is using it deliberately. Cheap Shahed-type drones are launched in mass waves to exhaust traditional air defence. Russia fired more than 54,000 of them at Ukraine during 2025, and Brovdi warns that 300 a day today could become 1,000 a day within a year.

Ukraine’s answer has been to fight cheap with cheap. Its “small air defence” ecosystem of interceptor drones, mobile fire teams and automated guns reduces the need for expensive missiles. By early 2026, Ukrainian firms were producing up to 1,000 interceptor drones a day, and in February these accounted for 70% of Shahed intercepts around Kyiv.

The lesson for NATO: air defence must be priced per intercept, not per system. A layered, affordable counter-drone shield is not an add-on to traditional air defence — it is what keeps traditional air defence available for the threats that truly need it.

Machines instead of people

A dense layer of drones lets a front be held with fewer infantry — critical when mobilisation reserves are running low. Ukraine’s defence-industry leadership sums it up simply: don’t send a person where a robot can do the job.

The shift is already visible on the ground as well as in the air. By mid-2026, around 280 Ukrainian companies were building more than 550 models of unmanned ground vehicles. Ground robots were running over 10,000 logistics missions a month by April 2026, and the Defence Ministry targeted 50,000 ground drones for the year.

Drones are mathematics

For Brovdi, the biggest change is not the airframe but the data. Every drone strike in Ukraine is recorded on video, verified and scored. That turns combat into something that can be measured, analysed, managed and planned with precision. Units even earn points for verified hits that they exchange for new equipment. A modern defence force, in other words, is as much a data system as a weapons system.

One war, three depths

Drones let an army fight at several depths at the same time. Brovdi breaks it down into three levels:

1. Tactical (up to 30 km from the front) — about 95% of all strikes. This is where drones have helped Ukraine balance its losses against Russia’s incoming manpower. The vast majority of the drones Ukraine produces are needed right here, on the battlefield, to hold the enemy back.
2. Operational — for example, around Crimea. Drones have blocked the activity of Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, and made it far harder to deliver ammunition and troops to the southern sections of the front.
3. Strategic (deep inside Russia) — about 5% of strikes, with outsized impact. Long-range drones target the sources that finance the war: industrial enterprises, the military-industrial complex, logistics hubs and air defence systems. They also carry a psychological effect, making Russians feel the war at home.

The takeaway for planners: the cheap, high-volume tactical layer does most of the work, but a small share of long-range capability changes the strategic picture.

Don’t underestimate Russia

Brovdi is clear that Russia is not standing still. Putin, he says, will not let his military machine cool down for even ten minutes — drones, missiles, air defence and personnel are all being expanded.

• Shahed production: Ukrainian estimates put Russia’s output at roughly 2,000–3,000 Shahed-type drones a month, plus thousands of decoys without warheads.
• Mass tactics: attacks have grown from groups of 20–30 drones to waves of hundreds, often combined with missiles, designed to saturate defences.
• Its own drone forces: Russia has set up dedicated unmanned units and is developing specialised anti-drone ammunition.

To counter this at the source, Brovdi argues, defenders need reliable communications — including satellite connectivity over Russian territory — so that drone and missile launch sites can be hit where they are, rather than intercepting every drone after launch.

What this means for NATO, the Baltics and investors

Counter-drone defence has moved from a niche to a budget priority, and the money is following. Market estimates vary widely depending on scope, but every major forecast points steeply upward.

Signal	Figure
Global counter-UAS spending, 2026 (Unmanned Airspace)	about $12.6 billion
Forecast for 2030 (Unmanned Airspace)	about $24.1 billion, ~18% annual growth
Publicly announced C-UAS contracts, Q1 2026 alone	more than $29 billion
Poland’s SAN counter-drone “drone wall” programme	$4.2 billion
EU EDIP 2026–2027 funding for counter-drone, missile and ammunition production	more than €700 million
Europe’s share of the global counter-UAS market, 2025	about 28%

For the Baltic states, sitting on NATO’s frontier with Russia and Belarus, the conclusion is not abstract. The threat Brovdi describes is cheap, massed and fast-evolving. The defence that works against it has to be affordable per intercept, layered, rapidly upgradable, and operated by well-trained crews.

Where DK NEJET stands

Ukraine has paid a heavy price to learn these lessons. NATO countries have the chance to learn them before the fight comes to them.

That is why DK NEJET exists. We develop counter-drone systems for the Baltic and NATO context, built on the same principles Brovdi describes: cost-effective against mass attacks, designed for fast adaptation, and useless without trained people behind them.

We Engineer. We Build. We Train.