Playing for Points: How Ukraine Turned Its Front Line Into a Video Game

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Video originally published on July 4, 2025.

On the battlefields of eastern Europe, Ukraine faces a constant disadvantage against a nuclear-armed major power. Outnumbered, outgunned, and sabotaged for nearly a decade before full-scale war erupted, Ukraine's leaders have been forced to find every possible advantage to turn the tables against Moscow. Whether through large-scale innovation in unmanned aerial drones, maritime drone deployment, or harnessing advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and virtual reality, Ukraine has proven tremendously effective at using creativity to close the gap. Now, well over three years into a full-scale war that Russia was supposed to win in mere days, Ukraine has found yet another way to gain a surprise advantage: by turning its battlefield into a video game through a program called Army of Drones, which harnesses the same incentives and psychological elements that make the modern video-game industry work—with spectacular results.

Key Takeaways

Ukraine's Army of Drones program applies video-game-style gamification—points, leaderboards, and equipment rewards—to its drone operations, significantly boosting battlefield efficiency and operator motivation.

The point system is dynamic: coordinators adjust target values in real time to reflect shifting battlefield priorities, effectively steering operator behavior without issuing direct orders.

Points earned by drone teams can be spent on new equipment through a digital marketplace called Brave1, which connects operators directly with drone manufacturers and streamlines procurement.

Results have been dramatic: the Birds of Magyar unit went from roughly 300 total hits in March 2024 to over 5,300 hits in March 2025, a more than seventeen-fold increase in one year.

In January 2025, the top two drone teams alone accumulated nearly 30,000 combined points, equivalent in value to nearly 5,000 Russian soldiers killed or almost 750 tanks completely destroyed.

About 90 percent of Ukraine's drone teams scored points under the Brave1 system within just weeks of its launch, indicating near-universal adoption.

Drones and Ukraine: A Love Affair

War is hell—a saying as true today as it ever was. The reality of battlefield horror is so profound that comparing war to a video game has been the subject of fierce controversy for decades. The fire and carnage of real battle, the imminent threat to life and limb, and the horror of seeing real blood spilt as real people are fed into a machine that trades humanity itself for treasure or territory bears little resemblance to an afternoon of casual gaming.

Yet despite the profound reality of battlefield horror in Ukraine, some of the nation's brightest minds have learned lessons that video games can teach about people—and thus, about people at war. Video games have been used as a model in Ukraine to help prepare soldiers for combat, rehabilitate veterans, and serve as training tools to help master new skills as rapidly as possible. But when it comes to Ukraine's drone operatives, the Army of Drones program focuses on a specific video game element: the use of incentives, adapting a video-game-style scoring system to both maximize troops' efficiency on the battlefield and track and reward the most successful or efficient soldiers at Ukraine's disposal.

Ukrainian drone operators have become synonymous with their nation's fight against Russia. The country's capacity to operate first-person-view, kamikaze-style aerial drones has become a hallmark of their fight against a much larger and more militarily powerful invader. Using cheap, consumer-grade materials and modern technology, Ukrainian drones and their operators have been a huge equalizer. They gather small-scale tactical intelligence on the battlefield, attack troops and heavy equipment with extreme precision, and conduct constant long-range attacks against Russian territory. Ukraine has tens of thousands of drone operators, relying on hundreds of startups and small drone-making foundries based mostly on Ukrainian soil. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the nation will produce upwards of four million drones in 2025 alone.

Ukrainian drone operators are everywhere in this conflict, from front-line positions helping small units conduct high-paced, constant asymmetric skirmishes, to forward operating bases where they coordinate drone waves and help infantry assaults. Some operate in specialized teams, providing niche capabilities to various points across the battlefield and traveling fast and light to do so. Others work in underground bunkers far from the front lines, spending hours upon hours guiding their drones around Russia's patchwork of air defenses—sometimes for thousands of kilometers at a time—before scoring hits in areas that Russia believed to be secure. Russia has adopted drone tactics as well, using the support of both forward-operating units and operators who can support from afar—even working, at times, out of their flats in some of Russia's biggest cities.

As drones take on premium importance in a conflict that's been a major learning experience for nations across the globe, their operators have become more valuable as well. Drone operators have become critical targets for both Russia and Ukraine, with hidden bunkers near front-line areas at constant risk of discovery and attack. They've also become a high priority for saboteurs, with Ukrainian intelligence officials indicating one particular attack to the global press in early 2025. Mirroring Israel's mass detonation of hidden explosives inside pagers distributed to Hezbollah operatives, Ukraine was purportedly able to plant explosives in some eighty sets of video-piloting goggles distributed to the Russian Army—blinding at least eight soldiers when they were eventually set off.

But just as important as figuring out how to take drone operators out of the fight is the task of figuring out how to make them more efficient in their work. Like any emerging technology, innovations in drone warfare have come along rapidly, especially in the use of sea drones—where, in another major milestone, Ukraine just notched the first confirmed shoot-down of a fighter jet using modified missiles mounted on an unmanned surface vessel. But even though drones, much like a missile, are unmanned systems, they're not autonomous. Instead, they're pieces of technology that rely on a human in the loop, more akin to the plane that the aforementioned missile shot down than the missile itself. Just like finding ways to improve pilot training, morale, or initiative can lead to significantly improved results in operations that rely on aircraft, the same is true for drones. Find ways to optimize the human, and drones can be made far more effective than they already were.

War Game: The Birth and Evolution of Army of Drones

Ukraine's initiative to enhance its drone-fighting operatives kicked off in 2024 at the nation's high command for unmanned warfare, based at a secret location not far from Kyiv. There, in a bunker where some of the most intense Ukrainian drone operations and engineering innovations take place, commanders decided to place drone teams into competition—not just with the Russians, but with each other and themselves.

The idea was fairly straightforward. The targets that drone operators were trying to destroy would be assigned values in the form of points. A lone infantry soldier, for example, would come with a relatively low point value; a piece of heavy equipment, like a modern main battle tank, would earn an operator more points if it were destroyed; and major targets, like refineries on Russian soil or headquarters where important Russian personnel were located, might be even better. Every week, commanders would release standings for the drone teams involved, while teams could track their progress constantly during the course of regular operations. At the time, the thinking was straightforward: to give drone operators incentives that might motivate better results, whether by getting them to figure out ways to launch attacks more frequently, getting more hours out of each operator, or getting operators to be more careful, so they'd choose to attack and expend a drone only when a hit was assured.

After the initial program went into effect, it led to rapid improvements within Ukraine's drone command, both in terms of battlefield results and in terms of troop motivation and morale. Like any other emerging battlefield technology, the next step was simple: whatever works, make more of it. In this case, that meant a quick expansion of the program's parameters, its incentive systems, and the programs that made it work. It also picked up a name: the Army of Drones program—perhaps not the most creative choice, but it does the job nonetheless.

Fast forward by another year, and the Army of Drones has become far more extensive. Today, it runs on a well-developed point system, with point awards balanced to reflect the prevalence of certain types of targets on the battlefield, the level of risk they pose to Ukrainian soldiers, and the level of difficulty in hitting them. A tank, for example, will net a drone operator twenty points for a direct hit—but forty points if it's destroyed completely. A mobile rocket-launch system is even more valuable, with drone operators scoring fifty points if they can take one out of the fight permanently. Russian soldiers have lower value, but they're certainly not valueless, coming in at six points apiece as of the springtime of 2025.

Those point allocations, however, are fluid—not just because certain equipment is more or less important in certain parts of the battlefield or at certain times of the year, but because the coordinators of the Army of Drones program have realized that they're a clean and easy way to make sure instructions are followed. If, for example, Russia starts up an unusual offensive in a given area that relies on only half the tanks of a normal advance but five times the number of infantry, then the last thing that Army of Drones coordinators want is for their operators to ignore infantry swarms while going after those high-value tanks. Instead, they can crank up the value of infantry troops, either micromanaging their value in individual engagements or, much more commonly, adjusting the point value of certain targets at a given time to reflect conditions all across Ukraine's massive front lines. In one recent example, Ukraine doubled the point value of a successful kill on Russian infantry; a hit on a soldier was worth just two points before that change went into effect. Since that time, the death toll of Russian soldiers due to drone strikes has gone through the roof. Kills are confirmed using video footage obtained by first-person drones, which isn't always saved for long-term storage but can be downloaded by drone operators if it depicts something that the operators would like their superiors to see.

Like any proper video game, the Army of Drones program's architects have learned that while even valueless points will attract the attention of their operators, the real results start to come in if the gamemakers can raise the stakes. To that end, Ukraine has adapted its drone procurement and distribution policies so that individual drones and other pieces of equipment can be earned using points that a drone team has collected and chosen to spend. A recent Politico article on the program spotlights Ukraine's Vampire drone, colloquially known as the Baba Yaga, a heavy bomber—at least on the scale of first-person-operated multirotor drones—capable of carrying bomb loads of up to fifteen kilograms. When a unit puts in an order, Ukraine makes sure the drone they're looking for is delivered promptly, and the most successful units get far more to work with. According to an Army of Drones commander quoted in that Politico article, Magyar's Birds, one of Ukraine's elite drone warfare units, 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.

Ukraine isn't just using that system to sate the appetites of its best operators. The nation has also invested in a specialized digital marketplace referred to as Brave1, bringing in the equivalent of in-game microtransactions—although those are expected to be far more popular for Ukraine's drone operators than they have been for gamers around the world. Brave1 connects operators directly with the companies that build the drones they're looking for, placing orders and benefiting from a competitive marketplace stuffed full with the various offerings of Ukraine's many dronemakers. For Ukraine, that's a system that should fix multiple problems at once, allowing these drone builders to get precise direction on what they need to build and the quantities being asked of them, while simultaneously saving resources on the bureaucratic side, so that some of the headaches of formalized procurement can be alleviated. Not only that, but it'll allow Ukraine to do the same thing for its builders as it's done for its operators, creating a system that directly incentivizes the best performers and delivers the resources they need—in this case, money—to be able to innovate further.

The Results: Quantifying Success on the Digital Battlefield

At this point, it's probably rather obvious that the popularity and expansion of the Army of Drones system would suggest that it's effective. But when we dig deeper into just how successful the system is, the value Ukraine sees in its program becomes abundantly clear.

We can start by talking about the view from within the program, where by this time, the results of the Army of Drones have become abundantly clear for its participants to see. According to an analysis by Ukrainian journalist Yuri Butusov via Censor.net, the month of January 2025 saw some stunning point totals from Ukraine's top teams. The group mentioned before, the Birds of Magyar, didn't even come in at first place for the month. Instead, a special forces group from Ukraine's National Guard known as Lazar just barely edged them out by a 139-point margin, equivalent to about eight tanks destroyed or twenty-three Russian soldiers killed. But look at their overall numbers, and it's a totally different story, with Lazar finishing the month at a point total of 14,896 and the Birds of Magyar finishing at 14,757, a combined total of nearly thirty thousand points between them. Translate those numbers to real results, and the two teams' work is astonishing; that's a point value equivalent to nearly five thousand Russian soldiers killed, or almost 750 Russian tanks completely destroyed.

Of the groups that round out the top-ten leaderboard for that month, six were able to collect at least five thousand points, while all ten were well over three thousand. Add together all of their points for the month of January, and they equate to the deaths of 12,363 Russian soldiers just via the top ten Ukrainian drone teams—although in reality, the point totals obviously come from a much more varied set of targets.

Let's talk about those targets and the real results that these drone units are able to produce. We'll turn again to the Birds of Magyar, analyzed in April 2025 by David Hambling writing for Forbes, based on the numbers they produced this past March. Birds of Magyar operators are diligent about gathering and posting all their results in detail, not just for audit within the Army of Drones program, but for public review. According to the group itself, the month of March alone saw it expend over 7,800 first-person drones, accounting for a full two-thirds of their attacks, while they used heavy bombers like the Vampire to carry out over 3,500 additional sorties—thirty-one percent of their attacks for the month.

They were able to score hits on over 5,300 targets, of which thirty-five percent were completely destroyed—1,848 targets—although a target destroyed could pertain to anything from a single soldier to an entire bunker. According to Magyar, they were able to hit 274 armored vehicles, 69 artillery pieces, 174 items of critical communications equipment, and 1,701 Russian soldiers, 1,002 of whom were killed. That, in addition to over two thousand hits against static structures. According to Magyar, they were able to get nearly seventy sorties out of the average Vampire drone before it was taken out, and about forty-five flights out of every reconnaissance drone before it met the same fate.

Again, this was just one unit of Ukraine's drone forces doing their part on a far larger battlefield—but Ukraine's programs have allowed them to improve at a stunning pace. In March of 2024, the Birds of Magyar recorded just a hair under three hundred total hits; just one year later, they hit over five thousand during the same single month.

All in all, Ukraine's UAV warfighters have taken to the Army of Drones program enthusiastically. According to Politico, about ninety percent of all of Ukraine's drone teams had already scored points under the new Brave1 system within just weeks of its launch date. As the article notes: "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've been able to achieve meaningful results all up and down the front lines and well into Russia's back lines, taking full advantage of their own creativity and operational versatility in order to do it. And with the drone operators going through something of a renaissance, they've been able to greatly enhance the rest of Ukraine's military, gathering ungodly amounts of real-time intelligence, enabling attacks and counterattacks by units at the front, and even beginning to shift Ukraine's method of warfighting so that the extreme positive results of these drone operators can be maximized even further in the near future.

A Game Worth Sharing? The Uncomfortable Questions of Gamified Warfare

When we zoom out from the battlefields of Ukraine and examine the Army of Drones program as a new feature of modern warfare, a couple of observations stand out. First, as many have already picked up on, the entire program implies something rather uncomfortable about warfare itself. As stated at the outset, and as those who have experienced it know firsthand, war is hell, and the agony and despair of any battlefield is something that commands a much-deserved respect. But there's something profoundly unserious about this way of looking at warfare, turning it into a literal game with an entire point system and incentive structure. That's something that the program's own participants are well aware of. Indeed, it's very common for global media interviews and conversations with Ukrainian drone operators to feature those same operators reckoning with the strange reality of their situation and working to emphasize the fact that they do grimly serious work, far from anything resembling a game.

But we can hold that reality in one hand, understanding that these operators do, indeed, understand and respect the horrific nature of drone-infused warfare. And as we do that, we can simultaneously try to make sense of the disconnect in a warfighting system that uses the same points, incentives, and team-on-team competition that modern gaming relies on. The process at work here isn't a gradual transformation of the battlefields of Ukraine into the next installment of the Battlefield series. Instead, it's a process by which Ukraine is figuring out how to seize on proven methods of getting the best possible performance out of teams of people sitting behind screens but directing implements of warfighting—and in today's world, combat video games are about as perfect an analogue as the nation can get.

With that comes a set of serious considerations on the nature of modern warfare: Where is warfare going? How is it evolving? What is it evolving into, and should the answer be cause for concern? But although those questions aren't answered, they're at least tempered by the cold, pragmatic calculus that runs through Ukraine's rationale.

Wars are meant to be won—and anything that inhibits a nation's ability to win a war should thus be questioned, deconstructed, and, if necessary, stripped out entirely. It's an uncomfortable revelation, to be sure, to have real-time evidence that a system that, by nature, strips away some of the somber and painful reverence of warfighting might actually achieve better results. But if the intent of a warfighter is to hack human psychology in order to make successes more frequent and make victory more likely, then that'll come with as many difficult revelations as came with the atom bomb, or the machine gun, or even the advent of bladed weapons in early history.

If soldiers, if human beings, are meant to be prized and valued for their humanity, then a system like the Army of Drones brings up profound questions and concerns. But if soldiers are meant to be tools in winning a war, then the Army of Drones program comes with real revelations about how to use those human tools to maximum effect. This tension—between the humanity of warfare and its instrumental demands—represents one of the most significant philosophical challenges posed by Ukraine's gamification experiment, a challenge that will likely resonate far beyond the current conflict as other militaries observe and potentially adopt similar systems.

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FAQ

What is the Army of Drones program?

The Army of Drones is a Ukrainian military program that assigns point values to battlefield targets and uses a video-game-style scoring and reward system to incentivize drone operators. Teams compete on leaderboards, earn points for confirmed hits and kills, and can spend those points to procure new drones and equipment.

How does the point system work?

Different targets are assigned different point values based on their battlefield importance, risk to Ukrainian soldiers, and difficulty to hit. For example, a tank earns 20 points for a direct hit and 40 for complete destruction, a mobile rocket-launch system is worth 50 points if destroyed, and a Russian soldier is worth 6 points as of spring 2025. These values are fluid and can be adjusted to reflect changing battlefield conditions and priorities.

What is Brave1?

Brave1 is a specialized digital marketplace that functions like an in-game store. Drone teams can use their accumulated points to place orders for specific drones and equipment directly from Ukrainian drone manufacturers, streamlining procurement and creating a competitive ecosystem that benefits both operators and builders.

What is the Vampire drone (Baba Yaga)?

The Vampire drone, colloquially known as the Baba Yaga, is a heavy bomber on the scale of first-person-operated multirotor drones. It is capable of carrying bomb loads of up to fifteen kilograms and is one of the items drone teams can acquire through the Army of Drones point system.

Who are the Birds of Magyar?

The Birds of Magyar are one of Ukraine's elite drone warfare units. They are known for their detailed public reporting of results and have accumulated over 16,298 points. In March 2025 alone, they expended over 7,800 first-person drones, scored hits on over 5,300 targets, and hit 1,701 Russian soldiers, 1,002 of whom were killed.

How are kills and hits verified in the program?

Kills are confirmed using video footage obtained by first-person drones during operations. This footage can be downloaded by drone operators if it depicts results they want their superiors to review, though it is not always saved for long-term storage.

How do commanders use the point system to direct operations?

Commanders can adjust point values for specific target types to steer operator behavior. For example, if Russia launches an infantry-heavy offensive, coordinators can increase the point value of infantry kills to ensure operators prioritize those targets rather than chasing higher-value but less tactically urgent equipment.

How quickly has the program been adopted?

According to Politico, about 90 percent of all Ukrainian drone teams had already scored points under the Brave1 system within just weeks of its launch. Demand has been so high that the government has had to revamp drone delivery logistics to keep up with points-heavy units.

Sources

About the Author

Jackson Reed

Jackson Reed creates and presents analysis focused on military doctrine, strategic competition, and conflict dynamics.

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