Ukraine soldiers now earn points for confirmed kills, prompting fears of a gamified war

Ukrainian soldiers are using a video-game-style system that rewards them with points for successful drone strikes, such as 12 points for killing a Russian soldier, 40 for destroying a tank.

“Basically, what Ukraine has implemented is a market … called the Brave1 Market, where units can go online, look at what defence technology is available for sale,” said Tim Mak, a war correspondent based in Kyiv.

“If you get more confirmed kills or you capture more enemy soldiers … you can then use those [points] to get more equipment and drones,” he told The Current.

The Brave1 Market has been described as an Amazon marketplace for war. It went online in April and was expanded in August, with 400 drone units now competing for points, according to Ukrainian officials. Wounding an enemy soldier earns eight points, while killing a specialist drone operator is worth 25. Video of each attack is analyzed by Kyiv before points are allocated, but not all rewards are tied to killing: there are 120 points for capturing a Russian soldier alive.

“This helps us stop the enemy,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, told The New York Times last week. “If this gives additional motivation to our military, we are happy to support it.”

Christian Enemark has studied the ethics of war for two decades. He said the points system’s resemblance to a video game raises some concerns.

“You run the risk of undermining a person’s sense of the moral seriousness of the deadly and destructive actions that they are taking,” said Enemark, a professor of International Relations at the University of Southampton in the U.K.

Speaking last week, Fedorov dismissed similar concerns about dehumanization.

“What is inhumane is starting a full scale war in the 21st century,” he said.

Not all Ukrainian officials are comfortable with the system.

“We want our people to come back from the war as human beings, not as killing machines,” former Ukrainian prosecutor Gyunduz Mamedov told Time Magazine in September.

“Some of these new systems make that more difficult, because the war can start to feel less real,” said Mamedov, who now advises the military on the ethics of drone warfare.

System meets soldiers’ need: reporter

Mak says he thinks criticism of the system is misplaced.

“There might be an ethical problem if you were incentivizing people to kill where there was no incentive otherwise. But the Ukrainians are in a war; they’re already killing one another,” he said.

Tens of thousands of people have died since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2022, in a conflict increasingly characterized by the use of technology such as drones. International efforts to broker a peace deal, including by U.S. President Donald Trump, have shown little progress.

Earlier in the war, Russia offered tiered cash incentives for soldiers who managed to take out Ukraine’s NATO-supplied tanks. Ukraine’s system differs in that it allows units to spend their points on military equipment, based on their own front-line needs.

Mak sees that as “a more transparent system of procurement,” allowing local commanders to meet the specific challenges they’re facing.

“As opposed to having a centralized system where the government says, ‘All units need this number of drones, all units need xyz,’ it allows units to be more flexible,” he said.

Enemark said that, from a government perspective, the system is “a really clever, novel approach to military logistics.” But he stressed it’s important not to lose sight of how those points are earned — a system that risks gamifying the taking of human life.

“Every war is a tragedy of human failure, and countries engaged in them try to do the best they can in a bad situation,” he said.

But while he said that Ukraine is fighting a war of national self-defence in the face of Russian aggression, “that’s not the beginning and the end of the moral story.”

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Tech must live up to ethics: expert

Enemark said that as warfare technology advances, it should still be held to longstanding ethical standards, such as discriminating between combatants and civilians.

“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,” he said.

“With each of these new innovations, we keep checking whether or not … those systems can adhere to the moral expectations that we have.”

Mak said he understands the concerns around gamifying war, but much criticism of the system comes from people who are not struggling with the daily reality of conflict.

“[For] someone who lives in a war zone or from soldiers who are in actual combat on a daily basis, that doesn’t really seem like a very valid point,” he said.

“Ukraine is trying to defend itself from ongoing attacks against the total annihilation of their country and their sovereignty.”