One afternoon this spring, Mykhailo Fedorov, a minister in the wartime government of Ukraine, turned up the volume on his laptop and played a video to illustrate his latest innovation. Its purpose, he explained, was to make the experience of combat feel more like a video game to Ukrainian troops—or as he put it, “to gamify” the war.
The clip showed a series of aerial strikes, each filmed from the vantage of a combat drone. One of them, apparently flying by night, had used its thermal-imaging camera to detect an enemy soldier in what looked like a field or forest. It was difficult to tell, because the background was dark and the figure in the frame resembled a white blob more than a human being. The Russian soldier seemed to freeze in place as the drone hovered. Then it dropped its explosive charge, and a shower of sparks burst outward from the spot where the man had been. “That’s six points,” Fedorov told me. “It used to be only four.”
A few weeks earlier, Fedorov had tweaked the algorithm he controls to increase the number of points the Ukrainian military’s drone units receive for killing a Russian soldier. The result of the change, he said, had been astonishing: “The kill count doubled in a month.”
At 34, Fedorov is one of the youngest members of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s war council, a square-jawed fitness enthusiast who likes to wear a black baseball cap over his crew cut. His office in central Kyiv feels as if it might be a frat house at MIT, with free weights and other workout gear surrounding the minister’s desk. On the day I visited, small drones stood on the shelves in various stages of assembly, their colorful wires and circuit boards exposed.
Over the past 3½ years of war, drones have done more than any other weapons to help Ukraine defend itself. They now account for about two-thirds of battlefield deaths in a war of attrition that has, by U.S. estimates, killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of troops. Ukraine has deployed drones by the millions, turning what began as a battle of tanks and artillery into a high-tech proving ground for the world’s deadliest gadgets. Fedorov, the country’s Minister of Digital Transformation, has played a key role in shaping the strategy. His latest scheme, known as the Army of Drones bonus program, brings elements of Roblox and Fortnite to both the blood-soaked realm of real-life combat and the arid one of weapons acquisition.
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The program established a system for Ukrainian drone units to document their strikes. Each confirmed kill receives a set of bonus points corresponding to the value that Fedorov, in consultation with the military brass, assigns to the targets. Around the time we met, destroying a Russian tank was worth 40 points. A multiple-rocket launcher was up to 50 points, depending on the type. At the end of each month, an official review board of experts and officers verifies each strike, tallies the points, and releases a list of the best-scoring teams. The points can be redeemed to order more advanced drones on a digital marketplace known as Brave1, which Fedorov’s ministry oversees.
Many of Brave1’s offerings are classified. But the public part of the platform lists hundreds of items for sale. Among the more popular is the Vampire drone, a heavy bomber with six rotors, which can be redeemed for 43 points. Fedorov says that logistics teams take about 10 days, on average, to deliver the purchased items, which the drone units use to carry out more strikes and amass more points.
Beyond its use as a motivational tool, the Army of Drones program allows the high command in Kyiv to adjust the targets their forces prioritize. If Ukraine needs to wear down the number of Russian artillery pieces, for instance, Fedorov can increase the number of points granted for destroying them. “In a war of technologies,” he told me, “nothing is more valuable than a clear understanding of what gear is going to get you the best results. Now we see it in real time—what’s working, what’s not.”
The Pentagon has taken notice. At the U.S. base in Wiesbaden, Germany, senior military officers have observed the program and drawn lessons from its success, one of them told me. It can take years, this U.S. official says, for the Army to order, receive, and deploy new weapons through the Defense Department’s system of procurement. “Our process is bigger and more cumbersome, more legalistic,” says the officer, who asked not to be identified, in keeping with military protocol. The Ukrainians, says the U.S. official, found a way to shrink that timeline down to a week using a military version of Amazon Prime, where commanders at the front can order what they need directly from arms manufacturers. “That’s something we look at and say, ‘Wow, could we do that?’”
Ukraine’s gamification of war may be the natural terminus of a tech culture that gamifies everything. Apps have learned that designing their interfaces this way increases user engagement, whether the purpose is learning a language or training for a marathon or getting better at chess. So in a sense it’s no surprise that Fedorov, the digital minister, would introduce a program like this in a country whose very existence now hinges on the ability to integrate cutting-edge tech into war. But turning lethal combat into a competition creates moral challenges on an entirely new scale, and solving them does not seem high on Ukraine’s present list of priorities.
I first heard about the bonus program about a year ago, when the founder of a Ukrainian drone unit joined me for lunch in Kyiv’s trendy district of Podil. Once the waiter had set two bowls of borscht on our table, my companion looked around the restaurant with an air of conspiracy and handed me his phone. “Check this out,” he said.
The screen showed the first monthly ranking in the bonus program, with his group in the top 10. “Think of it as an antidote to bulls–t,” he told me. By verifying strikes through video footage, it prevents units from falsifying their numbers in reports to the high command. It also serves “as a type of stimulus,” said the founder, who asked me not to identify him or the name of his unit for security reasons. “When other stimuli are running out, when people are getting tired, they find it hard to keep going on patriotism alone. So this gives them an extra push, an extra incentive.”
The Russians, faced with similar problems of flagging morale, have come up with a cruder response. Cash payments are handed out to Russian soldiers for their successes on the battlefield, with a destroyed tank or a conquered village potentially earning them thousands of dollars, according to Russian media reports and official statements. Battlefield injuries, like severed limbs, are likewise rewarded with sums that most soldiers could not earn in regular jobs.
Ukraine cannot afford that strategy. Its defense spending already amounts to more than 30% of its GDP, higher than any other nation in the world, according to the budget committee of the Ukrainian parliament. It has barely enough money to pay military salaries, let alone dole out bonuses. But in the summer of 2023, when Fedorov first suggested his system of gamification, top military brass rejected the concept. “The idea seemed insane to them,” he says.
Nearly a year passed before Fedorov got his chance to present the proposal at a meeting of Zelensky’s war council. The president listened to the pitch, nodded his head, and gave an order to the generals in the room: “Make it happen.”
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In August 2024, when the bonus program began, some of the top drone units in Ukraine refused to participate. Among the holdouts was Lasar’s Group, a secretive outfit whose commander, a former TV news producer named Pavlo “Lasar” Yelizarov, saw gamification as a symptom of inertia in the high command. “In a professional army, there should be internal mechanisms for assessing the quality of strikes, motivating forces, and deciding who gets more drones,” Yelizarov told me. Instead, Ukraine has relied on a game designed by civilians to rank and reward its best commanders. Yelizarov admits the game has made Ukraine’s drone warfare more efficient. But it has also come with risks, he says: “It concentrates all this sensitive data in one document, and it can fall into the wrong hands.”
Over the course of the program, such concerns have been validated. At first, the list of top-scoring teams would leak to the media at the end of every month. Later it began appearing on the Brave1 website, allowing the winners to advertise their lethality. Yelizarov saw such publicity as dangerous. “It reveals the leading figures among our drone units,” he says, “and that helps the Russians set priorities for whom to target.”
But in the view of most drone commanders, the value of the program outweighs these risks. Many of Ukraine’s military units rely on private fundraising to help supply the equipment they need. Fedorov’s Army of Drones program provided a form of free advertising, and few could resist the temptation to exploit it. Some of the drone commanders styled themselves as warrior-celebrities, appearing on talk shows and printing hats and T-shirts with their unit’s logos.
Even Lasar’s Group came around. After joining at the end of last year, it became a fixture of the leaderboard. Yelizarov’s name soon leaked to the media. In August, he agreed to appear on the cover of the Ukrainian edition of Forbes, which reported that his unit had destroyed Russian targets worth a total of $12 billion. “Lasar’s Group has changed the rules of battle,” trumpeted its latest promotional video, which Yelizarov sent me in September. “We showed the way that units of the future work.”
Last fall, when the Army of Drones game was in its second month, one of Ukraine’s leading drone units invited me to take a tour of their headquarters. At the time, its staff of several hundred men included dozens of strike teams, each with a drone pilot, a navigator, and several crew members. The pilots tended to operate from a safe distance, hunting their targets through computer screens or virtual reality goggles.
A handful of them, dressed in camouflage, stood up and saluted when one of their commanding officers brought me into their control room. Some looked to be in their teens. “If they have experience with PlayStation, that’s a big plus,” the commander told me, “because they already know how to use the controllers.” I asked what other forms of experience good pilots tend to have. “Gamers, basically,” said the commander, who asked that his name and the name of the unit be withheld for security reasons. “We get a lot of young dudes from the IT sector.”
For such recruits, the unit has been an attractive place to serve. Its fundraising efforts have allowed it to become “practically autonomous,” the commander told me. The base in Kyiv has a dedicated personnel department to recruit new troops, its own training program to educate them, and its own budget to pay their salaries.
Down the hall from the cafeteria, we came across the office of the unit’s in-house psychologist, who helps the men deal with trauma and post-traumatic stress. The psychologist told me his patients mostly seek help after trips to the front, where they experience the violence of the war up close. The pilots, by contrast, seldom show signs of psychological damage. “It’s more abstract to them,” he said. “It’s not so close.”
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This distance, both emotional and physical, has been among the advantages of waging the war with drones. In place of men, Ukraine has increasingly used machines to fend off Russian assaults, preserving the lives of its soldiers and civilians. But the approach may also carry a cost, one hard to discern in the middle of a grinding conflict.
“We want our people to come back from the war as human beings, not as killing machines,” says Gyunduz Mamedov, a former Ukrainian prosecutor who now leads war-crimes investigations and serves as an adviser to the armed forces on the ethics of drone warfare. “Some of these new systems make that more difficult, because the war can start to feel less real.” The next frontier in wartime technology, Mamedov says, will be artificial intelligence. The Brave1 marketplace already offers a variety of ways to upgrade a drone with AI software, which can be used for targeting, navigation, and other functions. The newest models of the Vampire drone, which is produced by a Ukrainian company called Skyfall, allows pilots to switch on AI mode midflight, effectively handing over the controls to an algorithm.
The drone’s developer, who also requested anonymity, has not yet made fully autonomous targeting available to the units that buy the Vampire. “We have the technology,” he told me during a recent tour of the Skyfall factory, which has the capacity to produce around 4,000 Vampires per month. “But I think we need to have a solid error-prevention mechanism in place before we allow a drone to make that decision about when to fire,” he says. “Who takes responsibility if the drone opens fire and ends up killing civilians?”
For Ukraine’s drone units, such questions can seem academic. Some already have begun to experiment with AI-enabled targeting systems that can decide when to fire. Those drones can participate in the bonus program. “A kill is a kill,” Fedorov told me.
As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nears its fourth anniversary, a few of Fedorov’s allies have suggested expanding the bonus program in disturbing ways. One drone developer cited the technology from a sci-fi novel called Ender’s Game, in which children are trained to unwittingly pilot swarms of drones in a space war. The young pilots are told they are only playing a game. “Technically, something like that is already feasible,” the developer told me. A drone pilot could sit anywhere in the world and operate their weapons at a distance, not knowing whether their screens are showing them a simulation of combat or an actual feed from the front. “At this point it’s just a thought experiment,” says the developer. “But things could go in that direction.”
Fedorov wants to use the bonus program to drive innovation, especially in the field of air defense, which has been one of Ukraine’s key vulnerabilities. In August, Russia launched more than 4,000 attack drones against Ukrainian targets, killing scores of civilians. The missiles used to shoot them down are effective, but they are often far more expensive than the drones themselves. In response, Fedorov raised the number of points awarded for shooting Russian drones out of the sky, and Ukrainian manufacturers have been developing cheap drones that can be used as interceptors. “It’s a new kind of air defense,” says Fedorov. “We’re just creating the incentives to build it.” For enough points, he says, the drone teams will find a way.
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