War has now entered the video game stage. Ukraine has placed a literal price tag on Russian lives, paying soldiers roughly $2,200 for capturing an enemy combatant and around $330 for killing one in close combat when confirmed by video. This is the monetization of death.
What better way to entice the youth than to turn war into a video game? Call of Duty-aligned missions are provided, as the Ukrainian government is providing incentives for death and destruction. The new bonuses are part of Ukraine’s broader transformation of its military into a contract-based force with higher pay, clearer service terms, and direct rewards for battlefield results. Frontline monthly pay reportedly averages about $6,700 and can exceed $10,000 depending on mission risk and performance. A captured Russian soldier brings 100,000 hryvnias, roughly $2,200, while killing an enemy soldier can bring 15,000 hryvnias, roughly $330. If multiple soldiers participate in a capture, the reward is divided among them.
The mathematics of war explains why a living Russian soldier is worth more than a dead one. A prisoner can be exchanged for Ukrainian POWs, providing Kyiv with leverage in future negotiations while allowing families to see loved ones return home. Captured soldiers also become intelligence assets, revealing information about troop movements, logistics, morale, and battlefield tactics. From a purely military perspective, one prisoner can produce far greater strategic value than one casualty. That is precisely why Ukraine’s incentive system pays substantially more for captures than kills. Modern warfare has become an exercise in cost-benefit analysis where even human lives are assigned a financial value based on their perceived utility to the state.
Ukraine has built a unique military incentive system: E-Points.
Units receive points for verified destruction of enemy equipment, personnel, and other combat actions. Those points can then be exchanged for drones, EW systems, and robotic ground platforms.
Every successful strike… pic.twitter.com/mY5f1Am8UI— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) May 24, 2026
This is what happens when war becomes permanent. Governments begin reducing human life to accounting entries. A prisoner has value because he can be exchanged. A dead man has value because he removes one more body from the battlefield. The military bureaucracy then assigns a number to each outcome, and suddenly killing becomes an incentive structure. The same people who lecture the world about morality are now openly creating pay scales for death.
Ukraine has already gamified drone warfare through its e-Points system, where units earn points for confirmed destruction of enemy personnel or equipment and use those points to buy more drones, ground robots, and electronic warfare gear through the Brave1 marketplace. Business Insider reported that more than 181,000 pieces of equipment have already been delivered through that system this year. The battlefield has become a marketplace. Kill, confirm, collect, upgrade, repeat.
“E-Points have already changed the approach to warfare. This is about clear incentives, fair rewards, and the rapid scaling of effective solutions. Military units receive resources based on results: the more targets they destroy, the more points they earn. This is a direct incentive that enables units to strengthen their capabilities with new technologies,” said Ukraine’s Minister of Defence, Mykhailo Fedorov.
This is the future of war. The drone operator earns points. The infantryman earns cash. The commander receives measurable performance data. The government gets propaganda footage. The dead become statistics on a dashboard. This is why drone warfare is so dangerous. It removes the final psychological barrier between the man pulling the trigger and the human being dying on the screen. Once killing becomes remote, verified, rewarded, and gamified, war no longer resembles anything the old generals understood.
The West created this nightmare by refusing to negotiate. They have thrown hundreds of billions into Ukraine while pretending this is about defending democracy. Now the war has produced bounty systems, drone leaderboards, prisoner incentives, and video-confirmed kills. This is not civilization. This is barbarism with software.
