Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
The tempo of Ukraine’s unmanned campaign against Russian ground forces has shifted again this fall.
New numbers from the Ukrainian officer running that campaign show it is now running ahead of every recent monthly benchmark, and he is signaling that Moscow is preparing a manpower push he expects to test that pace in October.
Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces (SBS) confirmed 6,280 strikes on Russian personnel during the first 15 days of September 2026, a 25.6% increase on the same window in August, when the count stood at 4,998.
SBS Commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi posted the figures to his Telegram channel on Tuesday.
The daily average of confirmed hits came to about 419 troops per day across the two-week window.
Where the strikes concentrated
Three sectors of the front carried most of the workload. In the Huliaipole area on the Zaporizhzhia axis, SBS crews recorded 1,927 confirmed strikes; in the Dobropillia sector of the Donetsk region, another 1,806; and in the Pokrovsk sector, 617.
Brovdi projected that if the operational tempo and weather held, September’s total would reach roughly 12,500 confirmed strikes, above the 11,010 SBS logged across all of August.
For comparison, the daily average in the first half of August ran at about 333 troops per day, according to figures the SBS commander released on August 16.
The autumn manpower warning
Brovdi tied the accelerating tempo to Russia’s own recruitment plans. He said Moscow intends to bring in an additional 300,000 personnel between October and December, running at roughly 70,000 mobilized a month and new contract signings on top of that.
That would be roughly double the 35,000-a-month average SBS has tracked from January through August.
“October-December 2026, we expect intensification, given the adversary’s intention to draw in an additional 300,000 units of manpower,” Brovdi wrote.
He did not disclose how SBS defines a confirmed strike, or how many of the 6,280 hits produced fatalities as against wounded.
Ukraine’s General Staff separately logged 20,360 total Russian personnel losses across all Ukrainian units between September 1 and 15, and 301,030 for the year through September 15, figures also carried by United24 Media in its coverage of Brovdi’s post.
