Points for kills: How Ukraine is using video game incentives to slay more Russians

KYIV — Ukraine's military is turning to incentive schemes used in video games to spur its soldiers to kill more Russian troops and destroy their equipment.

The program — called Army of Drones bonus — rewards soldiers with points if they upload videos proving their drones have hit Russian targets. It will soon be integrated with a new online marketplace called Brave 1 Market, which will allow troops to convert those points into new equipment for their units.

“Brave 1 Market will be like Amazon for the military, [it] will allow military units to directly purchase technologies they need on the war front,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation, speaking at a weekend military tech conference in Kyiv.

The program assigns points for each type of kill: 20 points for damaging and 40 for destroying a tank; up to 50 points for destroying a mobile rocket system, depending on the caliber; and six points for killing an enemy soldier.

Soldiers have to download the video footage taken by their drones confirming the kill to the military's Delta communication and situational awareness system.

Units will soon be able to use the special digital points they’ve been getting since last year by trading them in for new weapons. A Vampire drone, for example, costs 43 points. The drone, nicknamed Baba Yaga, or witch, is a large multi-rotor drone able to carry a 15-kilogram warhead. The Ukrainian government will pay for the drones that are ordered and will deliver them to the front-line unit within a week.

“In short, you destroy, you get the points, you buy a drone using the points,” Fedorov said.

He pointed to the accomplishments of Magyar's Birds, one of Ukraine's elite drone warfare units. It has run up a score of over 16,298 points, enough to buy 500 first-person view drones used in daytime operations, 500 drones for night operations, 100 Vampire drones and 40 reconnaissance drones, Fedorov said.

The scheme is aimed at directing more equipment to the most effective units.

It will also help to bypass bureaucratic procurement procedures and buy weapons directly from manufacturers. As of today there are more than a thousand articles on the Brave 1 marketplace, ranging from drones to robotic systems, electronic warfare systems, parts, AI systems and other weapons.

Soldiers will be able to leave reviews on the site to guide future purchases.

The ability to get points for killing enemy troops is also spurring competition among units; so far about 90 percent of the army's drone units have scored points. In fact, they are logging so many hits that the government has had to revamp the logistics of drone deliveries to get more of them to points-heavy units.

“They started killing so quickly that Ukraine does not have time to deliver new drones,” Fedorov said.

It also helps improve the military's verified data on the destruction of Russian targets in real time — boosting battlefield awareness.

The Ukrainian government is continually tweaking the system to make it deadlier.

“For example, we have increased the number of points for infantry elimination from two to six, and that has doubled the number of destroyed enemies in one month,” Fedorov said. “This is not just a system of motivation, this is a mechanism that changes the rules of war.”