WAR GAMES

How Ukraine turned drone combat into a competition

- BY SIMON SHUSTER/KYIV

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.