The place are you able to rating 12 elements for killing a Russian soldier in a drone assault, 20 for destructive a tank and as much as 50 for destroying a cellular rocket gadget? No longer on the newest online game, however slightly via Ukraine’s Military of Drones Bonus (ADB) programme.
Introduced in a while after Russia’s full-scale invasion started in 2022, prior to being made over in 2025, the ADB programme is the place elements win prizes. Army devices can use the elements and digital tokens they have got collected to shop for drones and different frontline apparatus to make use of within the war from the Ukrainian govt’s Brave1 site.
Via August 2025, army apparatus price over US$5 million (£3.7 million) have been delivered by the use of this market as virtual rewards for “playing” ADB. The scheme has since prolonged to reconnaissance and logistics operations, whilst taking pictures a Russian soldier now grants ten instances extra elements than killing one.
The ADB programme is an instance of what researchers name the “gamification” of battle – the place video game-like options are built-in into army coaching and fight operations. Ukraine’s former defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who used to be got rid of from his put up in July, has stated “motivation” is a key rationale for the ADB programme.
“When we change the point values, we can see how motivation changes,” he mentioned in 2025. Ukraine’s govt has described the ADB programme as “delivering results”, with submitted video proof confirming just about 820,000 Russian goals have been hit in 2025. Greater numbers of Ukrainian army devices also are now taking part within the festival.
Different schemes on this war have extensively utilized parts of online game design. Those come with Play for Ukraine. Advanced through Ukrainian IT experts in 2022, this scheme is designed within the type of a numerical puzzle sport the place each transfer a participant makes is helping level a cyberattack towards Russian govt and media internet sites.
As gamers make strikes within the sport, Play for Ukraine sends requests to focused Russian servers. They in the end change into crushed, inflicting internet sites to decelerate or crash. Play for Ukraine’s builders say 2,048 gamers had helped assault greater than 200 Russian internet sites within the first month of the scheme on my own.
The ADB programme is connected with the Brave1 on-line retailer, the place Ukrainian army devices can alternate e-points for drones and different frontline apparatus.
Brave1 Market
Gamification is neither unique to Ukraine or battle. Our personal analysis at the gamification of citizenship displays how cellular apps use virtual rewards, elements and leaderboards to incentivise excellent civic behaviour, equivalent to choosing up clutter, recycling and neighborhood volunteering.
For instance, since launching in the United Kingdom in 2021, over 10 million pieces of clutter were logged as binned in the course of the LitterLotto app. Each time an individual takes a photograph of themselves binning clutter, they earn entries into money prize attracts. The Equiwatt app additionally encourages UK electorate to scale back their power utilization at height instances in alternate for present vouchers and elements whilst competing on leaderboards.
Gamification is a well-liked characteristic of many different cellular apps too, equivalent to Duolingo and different virtual studying platforms. Those apps repeatedly use streaks to deal with consumer consistency, in addition to elements to lend a hand customers climb weekly leaderboards and development to better ranges. The purpose scoring utilized in trendy digitised war is a darker aspect to this pattern.
Whose lives rely?
In addition to serving to entrench online game options at the battlefield, the ADB programme highlights the position of international combatants within the Ukraine war and the complexities of whose lives “count”. It’s widely known that each Russia and Ukraine were recruiting international nationals to struggle within the battle.
This has infrequently been state subsidized. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, just lately warned that the North Korean govt used to be sending as many as 50,000 squaddies to struggle with Russian forces in Ukraine. International combatants have additionally been recruited through extra unofficial method.
Russia has arrange an international community for recruiting international nationals, focused on economically, socially, legally prone other folks from nations equivalent to Bangladesh, Nepal, Cuba and Kenya. The method used to recruit those other folks have ranged from enticement via prime salaries to deceit and coercion.
So the “Russian” body of workers price 12 elements for Ukrainian troops aren’t all the time Russian. International combatants also are regularly those who’re used as human shields, as one Bangladeshi recruit described it in a 2026 interview with DW, a German broadcaster, or driven to the entrance whilst the Russian troops keep at the back of. Even in a warzone the place lives aren’t valued, some stay much less valued than others and are subsequently much more likely to be killed.
The theme of gamification has endured in spite of those excessive prerequisites. Some Bangladeshi squaddies preventing in Ukraine have created large on-line followings, starting from a number of hundred thousand other folks to round 1 million, through vlogging from the frontlines. They proportion are living movies of fight from a first-person viewpoint, narrating on a regular basis lifestyles in combat and offering regularly dramatic pictures of drone assaults and close to misses.
Battle itself is obviously converting. However whether or not gamified or now not, the lives which can be misplaced are very a lot actual.
