Simon Shuster
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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