The New Dark Age

Ukraine’s new digital kill-points reward system, praised in the West as innovation, marks a chilling return to the ancient logic of ritualized violence—where death is commodified, incentivized, and gamified under the banner of progress.

Under the banner of innovation and morale, soldiers now earn digital credits for each Russian they kill or capture—redeemable for gear on a military marketplace called Brave 1. The more destruction they cause, the more they can buy. It’s a grotesque loyalty scheme for death, praised in Western media as “creative,” though it more closely resembles a dystopian video game powered by real corpses and funded by foreign aid.

A New Algorithm for an Old Evil

In a quiet government office somewhere in Kyiv, walls flicker with the live feeds of war. Dozens of screens stream aerial footage from drones prowling the trenches, watching, waiting, and striking. And on another screen, someone logs it all—a tank destroyed, a man obliterated, another captured alive. Each action earns a unit of “points,” a digital currency pegged to blood. A dead Russian soldier brings six points, a captured one sixty. A tank is worth forty. The kills are submitted like receipts, reviewed by anonymous analysts, and tallied up toward tangible rewards. This is the e-points system—an official government program that turns warfare into a performance and death into a marketplace.

Proudly titled “Army of Drones: Bonus,” the initiative is sold as innovation, a clever attempt to maximize limited resources and boost morale along a grinding front. What it actually represents is something far more sinister: the gamification of slaughter. Units upload video evidence of their kills, points are distributed based on impact, and soldiers can then redeem them on the Brave 1 Market—Ukraine’s own military-themed Amazon, where prizes range from drones to unmanned ground vehicles. This isn’t war. It’s a sweepstakes of death, applauded by the West and quietly expanded across most Ukrainian frontline units, with the language of optimization now serving as a thin veil over something deeply grotesque.

And grotesque it is. The idea of using point values to motivate soldiers might sound new, but history remembers this logic all too well. In Nazi Germany, SS officers under the Totenkopfverbände were evaluated and rewarded based on body counts, camp clearances, and extermination “efficiency.” Their promotions were rooted in the mathematics of murder, just as Ukraine now awards six points for a kill and encourages higher-value targets for more substantial bonuses. Back then, it was corpses and quotas. Now it’s drone footage and QR-coded death tallies. The machinery has changed—but the spirit is ancient and diseased.

Even more chilling is the resemblance to Cambodia under Pol Pot, where Khmer Rouge soldiers advanced by producing corpses for their commanders. Evidence of a kill brought honor; failure brought suspicion. That same perverse incentive now surfaces on the Ukrainian front, where soldiers reportedly argue over which unit gets credit for a drone strike, and some even target already-disabled vehicles just to rack up more points. This isn’t battlefield innovation—it’s moral entropy. Once killing becomes a commodity, truth is no longer relevant, and cruelty becomes not only permitted but encouraged.

From Ritual Sacrifice to Streaming Death

Throughout history, the most bloodthirsty regimes have made a show of death, elevating it to ritual, theater, and even status. The Croatian Ustaše, allies of the Nazis during World War II, devised competitions to see who could kill the most prisoners in a night. The murders were not strategic; they were ceremonial, a grotesque bonding exercise masked as military necessity. And in modern Ukraine, drone kills are edited with soundtracks, broadcast on social media, and rewarded like high scores. It is difficult to imagine the SS or the Ustaše dreaming of better propaganda tools than a GoPro-equipped quadcopter and a viral TikTok loop.

The system even resurrects the logic of Aztec sacrifice. In that empire, warriors earned prestige not for killing outright, but for capturing live victims to offer the gods. A captive was more valuable than a corpse. Today, a captured Russian is worth ten times a dead one—because he can be traded. Because he still has economic utility. Brave 1 calls this strategy. History calls it ritualized slaughter, dressed up in the language of logistics.

But perhaps the most modern echo of this darkness lies in Mao’s China, during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards—teenagers, idealists, zealots—earned their place in the new order by denouncing, beating, and killing the so-called enemies of the people. Public humiliation and executions were social currency. Status came from spectacle. And so it is with Ukraine’s drone war, where morale is driven by leaderboards and kill footage, and where the most dramatic explosion often earns the greatest reward. There’s no honor left in the ashes—only visibility.

Western Applause and Complicity

Meanwhile, the West watches in silence, if not outright approval. The BBC calls the system “creative,” praising its efficiency and adaptive nature. NATO officials say nothing. Washington continues to fund it. And no one, from the UN to the EU, questions whether incentivizing soldiers to kill for points—then shop for gear on a military-themed e-commerce site—might signal the utter collapse of moral restraint. This isn’t strategy. It’s theater for the soulless. And worse still, it’s spreading. What’s most inconceivable to me is the fact President Donald Trump is considering flooding more advanced weapons systems into Ukraine, including Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Fedorov, Ukraine’s so-called Digital Transformation Minister, beams with pride as he explains how tweaking point values changes motivation. He calls it data-driven warfare. But those who’ve studied history know what it truly is: the automation of atrocity. When life is measured in credits and death in metrics, war no longer serves the cause of defense or justice. It becomes a game for those who can afford to sponsor it—and a death sentence for those trapped inside.

So what are we left with? A system that marries Silicon Valley efficiency with SS logic, that gamifies murder with a leaderboard, and that rewards death with a shopping spree. No one has stopped to ask what happens to a soldier’s soul when the body count becomes a bonus code. No one wants to know what kind of society emerges from a culture where the value of a human life is determined by how many drones watched him die.

This is not the evolution of war. It is the return of something far older, something humanity once hoped it had buried: a brutal arithmetic of death, dressed in new digital clothes, but still reeking of the old blood. What we are witnessing, when you include the atrocity of Gaza, is the end of humanity, or at least civilization.

And if Ukraine, once framed as the “last stand of democracy,” must now resort to this sweepstakes of death to hold the line, then we must ask—quietly, soberly, and without illusion—has Zelensky’s NATO foothold already lost?

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books