The Current - Ukraine is using video game point systems to track kills

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

12 points to kill a Russian soldier, 40 points to blow up a Russian tank — These are some of the points rankings in a new incentive program for Ukrainian drone operators, who can now compete for points against other units and cash their points in to buy new weapons. Ukrainian officials say this program is helping maintain motivation in a war that is coming up to four years, but others have questioned the ethics of equating points to lives and incentivizing killing.

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It is real life, and Ukrainian drone operators are the ones who are playing this. Last month, the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation launched a new reward system for military units. Points are used to buy more equipment, and the unit's rankings are published in an online scoreboard. This program has received criticism for gamifying war and death. Ukrainian officials defend the program, saying it motivates soldiers in a war that has raged for almost four years. Tim Mack is a war correspondent based in Kiev and the founder of the counteroffensive. It's a publication covering human interest stories in the war in Ukraine. Tim, good morning.

Good morning. I want to get to this video game system in a moment. But first, just give us the latest on what's going on. There's been fighting in a city in eastern Ukraine. in the Dinesk reason in the last few days. What's going on in that region? And what does that tell you about what's happening broadly in this war? Well, there's a series of cities in eastern Ukraine that's known as the Fortress Belt.

These are heavily fortified cities that have been fighting really not since 2022, but since 2014 against either Russia or Russia-backed militias or forces associated with Russia. And so Russia is really trying to create a lot of pressure along those cities, trying to break logistics routes, and they're advancing, but they're advancing at a rate that could really be measured at meters as opposed to kilometers

at huge, huge human costs. I know we're going to talk about drones in a little bit, but basically we're seeing footage of enormous fields and expanses of areas where large numbers of Russian troops are losing their lives, charging forward, and gaining very little areas of territory.

I mean, if you check out some of these videos, And I don't particularly encourage it, but those who have or will will see just absolute human devastation out there in the east of Ukraine. And the cost for Russia is worth it because of what? I mean, that seems counterintuitive in some ways. The Russian military over the last century has really not prioritized human life as a military strategy. You know, they've been able to exist based on the strategy of, you know, so-called strategic depth and being able to use their soldiers as somewhat expendable. as compared to the Ukrainian way of trying to act on the defensive and preserve human life as much as possible.

And Vladimir Putin has seen his troops. He's willing to sacrifice their lives for his benefit. And you'll see how the incentives, and I think incentives will be a theme of our conversation, the incentives are not quite in line for him to back off of this strategy. One of the ways that Ukraine is going about preserving human life on its side of this conflict is by using drone warfare. Now, Russia is using it as well, but Ukraine has relied heavily on drone warfare.

Talk about this video game sort of incentive, this army of drones bonus system. What is this? Basically what Ukraine has implemented is a market, a market called Brave One market where units can go online, look at what defense technology is available for sale, that's UAVs, that's these flying drones,

electronic warfare systems, drones of all kinds. and use that online marketplace to purchase things for their units. One of the ways that they, one of the things that they've now implemented is a way in which if you get more confirmed kills or you capture more enemy soldiers, you get, as you pointed out, a number of points. Those points can then be pushed back into the system. It's kind of like a bonus system in which you can then use those to get more equipment

and drones. People have said that the store is kind of like Amazon for war and that you get points based on what you destroy or who you kill and that you can use those points in that Amazon type store. Is that accurate? That's one way to look at it. And another way to look at it is that there's a more transparent system of procurement where you have more options for local commanders and local units

to make decisions about what to get for their local challenges and environments. It's an innovative look at how you can decentralize the procurement system as opposed to having a centralized system where the government says all units need this number of, you know, drones, all units need X, Y, Z. It allows units to be more flexible in what they actually get. What has attracted international attention is the point system here and the fact that you get a certain number of points for killing somebody. How popular has this become? Well, you know, the criticism, I think, is a little bit misplaced. I mean, there might be an ethical problem if you were incentivizing people to kill where there was no incentive.

otherwise. But, you know, the Ukrainians are in a war. They're already killing one another. This basically just incentivize them to be more efficient with their equipment and to be more serious about gathering battlefield data about, you know, how many trucks and tanks and armored vehicles have been destroyed. It incentivizes them to be more efficient. It doesn't create killing where killing might not otherwise exist. If you, if you get the distinction that I'm trying to make here. Absolutely. And that's why I think the ethical problems are a little bit misfounded.

I think also a lot of these criticisms might come from a sort of an instinctual feeling that people who are outside of war might feel, we don't really want to gamify killing. And I can understand that. But from someone who lives in a war zone or from soldiers who are in actual combat on a daily base, That doesn't really seem like a very valid point because Ukraine is trying to defend itself from ongoing attacks against the total annihilation of their country and their sovereigns. I guess I just asked about the popularity because people have applied the word viral to this system. And I just wonder whether this has turned into something. I mean, that's a word that's applied to videos that are circulated online or video games as well and whether that's fair.

What I would say is the whole concept reflects, my theory on this is that this reflects millennials coming into positions of power and innovation, right? That this video game generation is now, you know, millennials are now in their early 40s, late mid-30s, and they've played video games all their lives. If you look at, for example, the controllers of these drones, the easiest way to teach someone how to use new technology is to give them something they're familiar with. And so when you look at the drone controllers, you'll find that they look a lot. lot like video game controllers. In fact, some are just video game controllers in order to make

it the easiest possible transition into using new technology. And so when we talk about the gamification or the virality of this sort of thing, I think it's a natural extension of the millennial generation pushing into these innovation spaces and command spaces and leadership roles. I have to let you go, but we're talking to the beginning of November and winter is, if not on the doorstep than certainly very close in Ukraine. How are people feeling given another winter coming where there could be attacks on heat and electricity and another series of months of real difficult times in that country? One thing to know for a Canadian audience is that Ukraine, unlike Canada, has this kind of

post-Soviet legacy where in many of the cities, heat is centrally produced and then shunted to apartment complexes through pipes. So that's how they create this kind of heating throughout the city. But that makes it very vulnerable to attacks in a time of war. And Russia has targeted both energy production facilities and heating production facilities, meaning a large portion of Ukraine is going to struggle with keeping the lights on and keeping their homes warm over the next few months. We're already seeing power outages in Ukrainian cities. In key, for example, just today there's going to be several hours at my apartment without power. We're going to see that throughout the winter.

This started as early as October. And so we're looking at a very difficult and cold winter ahead. Tim, it's good to talk to you as always, and we'll speak again in future. Thank you very much. Thanks so much. Tim Mack is a work correspondent based in Kiev and the founder of the counteroffensive. The headlines never stop and it's harder than ever to tell what's real, what matters, and what's just noise. That's where Potsave America comes in.

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Russia's war with Ukraine has been, in many ways, a war of technology, with the two sides seeking to gain a technological edge over the other. Christian Enmark is a professor of international relations at the University of Southampton in the UK and has been researching arms control and ethics for two decades. Christian, hello to you. Hello, Matt. How have drones changed the way this war has been fought on both sides? on both sides of this war drones have been a very cheap and effective way of causing harm to the enemy it's also the case that almost always there is a camera equipped onto the drone which makes targeting more easy you can really follow an object or a person and the speed with which damage can

be inflicted on either side is just so much faster because of this technology. And that is a kind of added layer of military force being able to be applied across what is, for the most part, a war of attrition involving aerial bombardment and artillery. Dron warfare has been dogged by ethical concerns long before the war in Ukraine. But again, this new Ukrainian drone program with these incentives and, you know, Amazon-like store where you can redeem points, example. How do you see that? As somebody who researches ethics and drone warfare? Sure. Well, I mean, I acknowledge that if we were to look at this only from the Ukrainian government's perspective, we could say, well, the spending of these points is indeed a really clever novel approach to military logistics,

military procurement because it's easy to see how in this kind of supply and demand way you can rapidly get resources to those parts of the front line where they are calculated to be most effective. But of course, we don't only have to look at it that way because in order for those points to be spent, they have to be earned. And I think the earning of those points, I think, is more closely related to potential concerns from an ethical perspective as a matter of military ethics, because I think when you cause there to be a resemblance between warfare and gaming, I think you run the risk of undermining a person's sense of the moral seriousness of the deadly and destructive actions that they are taking.

The Ukrainian Minister for Digital Transformation, this is the body in the government that launched this program, defended it, saying, in his world, words, what is inhumane is starting a full-scale war in the 21st century. What do you make of that rationale? That this is a war. There might be some gamification, but at its base level, this is a war. Look, it certainly is, and every war is a tragedy of human failure, and, you know, countries engaged in them, try to do the best they can in a bad situation. And in Ukraine's case, there's no doubt that it is fighting its war in a just cause. It's a war. It's a war. It's a war of national self-defense. It's been a victim of an aggressive Russian attack. But that's not the

beginning and the end of the moral story that you can tell about this war or any war. And when the word inhumanity is mentioned like that, it's important always to remember the potential victims of war and those individuals whose job it is to kill people and break things. And it is sometimes times the case that that experienced, that prolonged horrific experience of wielding violence constantly, especially when it's videoed using a drone, that can be very emotionally damaging, very morally injurious to individual war fighters. What do we know about that? What do we know about how using drones to be, I mean, to commit, you know, warfare, what does that do to the drone operators themselves?

Look, there's some evidence emerging from experience with American and British uses of very long-range drones in other parts of the world. And occasionally, an individual drone operator will go on to the public record and explain what it was like to kill in the way that they did. And in those circumstances, it's really the camera that is attached to the drone that makes such critical difference in terms of the experience of killing someone else, especially when prior to that moment of killing, you've been watching that person doing quite ordinary looking things for hours or days leading up to that. And there's a profound sense of the gravity of what you're

about to do under those circumstances. So even though a person can be very physically distanced from their would be victim, the drone's camera really brings the user of force up close to the person who is about to be killed. I mean, it's interesting. Some of that criticism has come from Ukraine itself. A former Ukrainian prosecutor who now advises the military said to Time Magazine, and these are his words, we want our people to come back from the war as human beings, not as killing machines. Some of these new systems make that more difficult because the war can start to feel less real. So just finally, I mean, if warfare is increasingly being automated, we're not even talking

about artificial intelligence here, but if it's being increasingly fought from a distance and part online, how do we have to rethink the ethics around war? Or do we? I think the ethics of war are really good just as they are. Some very old, still good principles about the importance of being humane, the importance of discriminating between combatants and civilians, the importance of fighting and a just cause rather than in an aggressive enterprise, those ethical standards and expectations are still good in 2025. It's the technology that has to live up to those moral standards and expectations. It's not the case that we should be revisiting or watering down, downgrading our expectations ethically just because a particular

technological capability has come along. It rather has to be the case that with each of these new innovations, we keep checking whether or not the design and use of those systems can adhere to the moral expectations that we have. Is that possible in the heat of battle as a war is unfolding? Universal constant adherence has never been possible, but we always have to be aspiring to adhere to those principles. Christian, good to speak with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Christian and Mark is a professor of international relations at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. He studies arms control and ethics. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

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