“Operation to strike Russian targets deep in swamps continues”: Ukrainian Commander Madiar says his unit hits 7,306 Russian troops in first half of October, up 59% on August

Операція ураження цілей Росії у глибині боліт триває.

Ukraine’s operation to strike Russian targets at operational and strategic depth is continuing, Unmanned Systems Forces Commander Robert “Madiar” Brovdi says. The fresh statement lands amid fears that a Starlink disruption could break front-line operations.

Overnight into 14 October, the 7th Air Assault Corps said the faster StarShield military package, an advanced version of Starlink that its units depend on, had been throttled, halting a series of missions. Against that backdrop, Brovdi says his branch’s strikes are not falling.

“A serious brawl is underway in conditions of significantly worse weather, drizzle, fog, and precipitation,” Brovdi says, underscoring that the pace held through conditions that usually ground drones.

Over the first two weeks of October, the drone branch verified 7,306 Russian soldiers killed or wounded, up 59.45% on the same period in August and 24.65% in September, he writes on his Telegram page, calling the trend the opposite of de-escalation.

Where the killing climbs fastest, and who is doing it

One sector stands out above the rest. On the Dobropillia-Pokrovsk axis, in the zone of the Azov group, the branch’s drones accounted for 3,221 Russian losses in the first two weeks of October, a 102% jump on August and 42.5 percent on September, Brovdi reports.

The figures cover only the drone branch and are verified in the military’s Delta, the video fixation system, he stresses, so the full count of Russian losses across all Ukrainian forces can be much higher.

The scale of a campaign that will not slow down

The numbers behind the claim are large. Over the first two weeks of October, the branch flew 124,500 combat missions, strike and reconnaissance, and hit 32,172 Russian targets, of which manpower was 22.7%, by his count.

That works out to about 2,298 Russian targets a day, he adds, the kind of tempo that makes any talk of a lull on the front hard to square with what his drones are recording. The deep-strike half of that campaign has grown 1,150% over 2026, reaching military-industrial and energy sites far inside Russia, according to Euromaidan Press.