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Japan Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Japan Times
Russia at the gates: How Ukraine defended a strategic city for months
For months, Ukraine has picked off Russian soldiers by the thousand around the front-line city of Pokrovsk, using small drones armed with bombs to tie down a numerically superior force. Now though, Russian troops are creeping forward in a summer offensive that has probed weak spots in Ukraine's defenses and last week saw some Russian soldiers enter the city for the first time, according to geolocated footage on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels. Ukrainian soldiers' success in stopping their enemy from taking Pokrovsk since last year has long thwarted one of Moscow's central military goals, although the city itself is heavily damaged and all but a few hundred of the 60,000-strong population has fled. Pokrovsk sits atop large coking coal reserves and, until Russian forces moved closer, was important to Ukraine's military supply lines in the country's east. More than a dozen sources, including Ukrainian soldiers and relatives of Russian soldiers missing in action around the city, were interviewed for this report, and two trips were made to the area over four months for the shifting tactics in the key theater of the eastern front to be examined. The Pokrovsk front is the most active in the war, with 111,000 Russian soldiers amassed there for the summer offensive, Ukrainian top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi has said. Russia's forces initially aimed to seize Pokrovsk early last year, first with frontal assaults and later trying to encircle the city, which Russia calls by the Soviet-era name Krasnoarmeysk, or Red Army town. Members of the White Angel unit of Ukrainian police officers check an area for residents to evacuate in Pokrovsk under attack from Russian forces on April 12. | REUTERS Ukraine slowed the advance this spring by deploying experienced units, laying minefields and other defensive barriers, while harassing Russian forces with large numbers of drones, said Viktor Trehubov, spokesperson for the military administration that covers Pokrovsk. "They didn't stop trying to advance, but we were repelling them well,' said an artillery unit soldier who goes by call sign Vogak and serves on the Pokrovsk front. Since then, Moscow's forces have picked up the pace, adapting and expanding the use of drones in their own arsenal. Russia has built on the lessons used in pushing Ukrainian forces out of its Kursk region, where it first scaled the use of fiber-optic cable drones that cannot be stopped by the electronic jammers both sides used to confuse regular radio-controlled drones, analyst Michael Kofman said. The spools of hair-like cable give them enough range that Russia can threaten Ukraine's forces and logistics 25 kilometers behind the front line. Russia has more of the fiber-optic drones than Ukraine, giving them an advantage, said Roman Pohorilyi, the founder of Ukrainian open-source research group DeepState. The advances accelerated after Russia took control of a highway in May that connects Pokrovsk to Kostiantynivka, another of Ukraine's "fortress cities" in the east, a map generated by DeepState shows. Anti-tank fortifications called "dragon's teeth" are seen near Pokrovsk on May 21. | REUTERS One of the main roads to the city is covered by nets to protect vehicles from Russian drone strikes. Serhii Dobriak, the head of the local military administration, last week said it was increasingly hard to deliver food to the city and that grocery stores would have to close in the coming days. While faster than before, Russia's territorial gains remain minor, with only 5,000 square kilometers of Ukraine taken since the start of last year, less than 1% of the country's overall territory, according to a June report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. In total, Russia has occupied around a fifth of Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the entry of small groups of Russian troops into Pokrovsk was insignificant and that they were "all destroyed" by Ukraine's soldiers. Russia's Defense Ministry did not respond to detailed requests for comment for this story. At what costs? Serhii Filimonov, commander of a Ukrainian military battalion called "Da Vinci Wolves,' which operates around Pokrovsk, saw first-hand how Russia's glacial advance on the city over the past year cost it heavily in killed and injured soldiers in the first half of 2025. Russian soldiers tried to advance by stealth but were hounded by Ukrainian soldiers flying small quadcopter drones mounted with cameras and explosives, he said. "Every prisoner says drones are the thing they are most afraid of, the thing that constantly kills them, and the things they see when they sleep, the nightmares they have,' Filimonov said in an interview in April, citing debriefs of Russian soldiers captured by his men. Ukrainian drone pilots operate a Vampire drone amid Russia's attack on their country, at an undisclosed location in the Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine, on April 7. | REUTERS Filimonov said groups of attackers were given a phone with a location pinned on a map, and told to head toward it. If the first group was killed, another one was sent to replace them, he said, citing the debriefs. his account could not be independently verified. The Russians operated in raiding parties of around a half a dozen, often advancing on foot because large vehicles are an easy target for drone pilots, Filimonov and Trehubov said. Some left their vehicles as far as 15 km from the front line and walked the rest of the way to be less visible to drone operators, Filimonov said. Others have taken to motorbikes to outpace the aircraft, piloted by Ukrainian soldiers often wearing virtual reality-style goggles attached to a drone's camera, offering a first-person view of the route and target, Trehubov said. The Ukrainian resistance in and around Pokrovsk has blocked Russia's ambition of taking the remaining parts of Ukraine's Donetsk region, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's principal war aims. Although its significance to Ukraine as a military supply center has already faded, Pokrovsk's fall could free up Russian troops and open the door to more Russian advances in the region, Kyiv-based military analyst Serhii Kuzan said. Apartment buildings hit by Russian military strikes in Pokrovsk on May 21 | REUTERS More than a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, almost a quarter of those since the start of this year, according to British military intelligence estimates. These numbers could not be verified. Neither Ukraine nor Russia gives official data on their own personnel losses. Ill-trained Toward the end of last year, Moscow's commanders deployed soldiers with very little training, including convicts or injured men, according to conversations with five relatives of Russian soldiers. The relatives did not want their identity or the soldiers' identities published for fear of reprisals. The army struggled to account for who was missing or dead, the relatives said. One soldier was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front despite having an injury to his leg sustained on previous missions, according to a relative. "He could barely walk,' the relative said. He went missing on March 9, when his vehicle was hit. The relative said a member of his unit, to whom she had spoken, had heard him over the radio after the strike, saying he had been badly wounded. He was listed as absent without leave, she said, though she believes he is dead or taken prisoner. Another soldier, recruited from a Russian penal colony on Dec. 18, was given a week of training and on Dec. 26 was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front, according to a relative. The relative said he had not been heard from since. Shortly before the mission, the soldier rang relatives to ask them to send 50,000 roubles ($600) so he could buy a walkie-talkie. She said the soldier was officially listed at the end of December as having gone absent without leave, but she believed he was dead. A third soldier, a 21-year-old father of two from western Siberia, signed a contract with the army in 2024 after he was promised a non-combat role far from Ukrainian front lines and signing-on bonuses of 1 million roubles, according to his relative. A Ukrainian drone pilot operates a drone using virtual reality-style goggles at an undisclosed location in the Dnipropetrovsk region on April 7. | REUTERS But instead, he was sent to Ukraine and in late December, he was ordered on a raid near the village of Vovkove, on the Pokrovsk front. In January, he was designated as absent without leave. At the end of April his family was notified he had been killed in action on Dec. 27, according to the relative and letters from the military. His relative said the family received 5 million roubles and a monthly pension as compensation for his death. Russia adapts The overall commander of Ukraine's land forces, Major-Gen. Mykhaylo Drapatyi, was given the additional direct responsibility for the part of the front that includes Pokrovsk in January, after another town fell. Drapatyi, who previously stopped a Russian offensive on the second city of Kharkiv, brought "a fresh vision' to the battle, helping mount counterattacks to disrupt Russian advances and threaten its local logistics, DeepState's Pohorilyi said. However, Russia's adaptation and new technology such as the fiber-optic drones have shifted the balance. What soldiers call the drone "kill zone' stretches several kilometers either side of the front line. That creates challenges to sustaining logistical supply chains for both armies. Any vehicle bringing forward fresh supplies of men, ammunition, food and water can be targeted. The overall Russian advance over the whole front line doubled from 226 square kilometers in April to around 538 square kilometers in May, according to open-source analyst Pasi Paroinen with the Finnish "Black Bird Group.' DeepState estimated that Ukraine had its biggest territorial losses of 2025 in June. More than a quarter of the 556 square kilometers taken by Russia in June were on the Pokrovsk front, DeepState estimated. Filimonov's Da Vinci Wolves fight on, defending the city against Russia's latest recruits. "Russia finds new victims, which it throws into the furnace,' he said.
CNN
4 days ago
- CNN
Brutal punishments are being meted out to Russian soldiers no longer willing to fight for Putin
Russian soldiers call the practice a sacrifice to Baba Yaga, a fearsome witch from Slavic folklore who feasts on her victims. A Russian serviceman is seen on video being tied up to a tree and abandoned to his fate – possibly death – at the hands of one of Ukraine's large attack drones. Why this is happening is clear from a radio intercept about a similar incident, shared with CNN, in which a Russian commander can clearly be heard ordering a subordinate be tied up in this way as punishment for desertion. The instruction is given twice: 'Hide him somewhere (while the fighting is ongoing) then take him out and tie him to a tree … in the next half hour.' A Ukrainian drone battalion commander, says he has observed it happen twice and heard it happening on radio intercepts many more times. 'Any large Ukrainian drone they call Baba Yaga. It spreads terrible panic in these damaged people. For them, it's some kind of scary myth that flies in and kills everyone,' the commander, who goes by the callsign Munin, told CNN. The practice is one of a sickening array of battlefield mistreatments recorded on video either by Ukrainian surveillance drones or Russian servicemen and then circulated on social media. As Moscow's forces make slow but seemingly inexorable progress inside Ukraine, the videos paint a grim picture of the realities of life inside Putin's army – a service which tens of thousands of Russian men are estimated to have fled since the start of the full-scale invasion in early 2022. In the video, apparently filmed last winter, the man is shown in close-up, tied to a tree. The man says he is from Kamensk-Uralsky, a city in Russia's center, on the eastern side of the Ural Mountains. He explains that he fled his post after being spooked by a Ukrainian drone flying overhead. A fellow soldier who caught up with him then made him an offer, he says. 'Let me make you '300' so you'll be withdrawn,' the soldier had said, using a term signifying a wounded fighter in the Russian army. Then came the quid pro quo. 'You shoot me, and I will shoot you.' The man tells the camera he refused but says the other soldier shot him anyway, rendering him an easy capture by men from his unit. With a thick cable now tethering him to the tree, he looks nervously to the skies as a voice behind the camera tells him there is a drone on the way. '(If the drone) comes here, she's going to drop everything on you,' the voice taunts. At this point, the clip ends, the soldier's fate unclear. In common with many armies, Russia does not talk publicly about desertion in the ranks. But social media channels – usually Telegram – provide a glimpse into the deep anxieties and desperation felt by many soldiers and their families and give a sense of why some Russian servicemen chose to quit. 'Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich,' begins one video posted to Telegram by a man identified as Yuri Duryagin, in what amounts to a personal appeal to Russia's President Putin for help. Duryagin says he was fighting in Ukraine's Donetsk region, where poor equipment and a lack of ammunition meant only 32 men from his company survived one particular assault. Typically, a company might have up to 150 personnel. He tells Putin he has received less than a fifth of his salary but adds his superiors tell him he would be wasting his time complaining. When deaths occurred on the battlefield, they were often covered up to avoid paying compensation to families of the bereaved. 'I personally saw comrades die before my eyes. They were killed. Parents tried to find out information about their relatives and loved ones, but they were told that the person was missing,' he says. Perhaps most damning of all, he appears to accuse one commander of shooting those who refuse to take part, saying he 'put people up against the wall because they simply refused to go up against a machine gun.' 'Violence is what is keeping the Russian army going and what is glueing it together,' said Grigory Sverdlin, founder of Get Lost, an organization helping Russian men to desert, or to avoid conscription in the first place. He spoke to CNN from Barcelona, Spain, where the organization is now based. Get Lost has helped 1,700 people to desert since it was launched six months into the full-scale invasion, Sverdlin claims. The total number of desertions from the Russian army is hard to determine but he estimates it to be in the tens of thousands. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US-based analysis group, cites what it says is leaked data from Russia's Defense Ministry that suggests it could be as high as 50,000. Many desert before they are deployed, complaining of poor training lasting just one to three weeks, Sverdlin said, while those who quit during deployment often describe a culture marked by nihilism. 'Their lives are not worth anything to their commanders. For Russian officers, losing a tank, losing a vehicle, is much worse than losing, say, 10 or 20 people,' Sverdlin said. 'We often hear from our clients that officers tell them they will all be dead in a week. The officer will get another unit, so it's not a problem for them.' For Russian soldiers convicted of desertion, the sentence can be up to 15 years in prison. But the videos circulated on social media indicate ad hoc punishments are also widely carried out on the ground, with the same aim of deterring others from running away. In one, a man behind a camera approaches a large metal storage tank with a ladder on the side. 'Time to feed the animals! The ones who tried to f**k off! Let's find out what they are doing,' the man's voice says, sliding open the container lid to reveal three men stripped to their underwear hunkered down inside. 'You hungry?' the voice taunts. 'Do you want a cookie?' One of the men nods and a biscuit is crumbled into his outspread hands, which he quickly eats. Another video shows a man cowering on the ground as he is kicked repeatedly in the face. He has an orange belt tied to one of his ankles. The other end is attached to a jeep, which drives off at speed, circling a field, dragging the man bouncing behind it in a punishment known colloquially as 'the carousel.' And in another, a man is tied to a tree with a rusty bucket over his head. After the bucket is removed, he is kicked repeatedly in the face before apparently being urinated on. CNN reached out to Russia's Ministry of Defense for comment on the punishment of deserters shown in the videos but did not receive a reply. Estimates by Western governments and academic institutions put the number of Russians killed or wounded since February 2022 at about one million. NATO's secretary general said recently that 100,000 Russian soldiers had died in 2025 alone. Ukraine has its own problems with morale and desertion but one sentiment is likely far less prevalent among its ranks: lack of belief in the cause. Sverdlin said this is what he hears voiced most often from the Russian soldiers he helps to desert. 'Some of them just tell us 'I don't want to die here,' but I would say the most common words are 'it's not my war, it's not our war … I don't understand what the hell we are doing here.''
Reuters
4 days ago
- Politics
- Reuters
Insight: Russia at the gates: How Ukraine defended a strategic city for months
DONETSK REGION, July 28 (Reuters) - For months, Ukraine has picked off Russian soldiers by the thousand around the frontline city of Pokrovsk, using small drones armed with bombs to tie down a numerically superior force. Now though, Russian troops are creeping forward in a summer offensive that has probed weak spots in Ukraine's defences and last week saw some Russian soldiers enter the city for the first time, according to footage on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels and geolocated by Reuters. Ukrainian soldiers' success in stopping their enemy from taking Pokrovsk since last year has long thwarted one of Moscow's central military goals, although the city itself is heavily damaged and all but a few hundred of the 60,000-strong population has fled. Pokrovsk sits atop large coking coal reserves and until Russian forces moved closer was important to Ukraine's military supply lines in the country's east. Reuters spoke to more than a dozen sources including Ukrainian soldiers and relatives of Russian soldiers missing in action around the city, and made two trips to the area over four months to examine the shifting tactics in the key theatre of the eastern front. The Pokrovsk front is the most active in the war, with 111,000 Russian soldiers amassed there for the summer offensive, Ukrainian top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi has said. Russia's forces initially aimed to seize Pokrovsk early last year, first with frontal assaults and later trying to encircle the city, which Russia calls by the Soviet-era name Krasnoarmeysk, or Red Army town. Ukraine slowed the advance this spring by deploying experienced units, laying minefields and other defensive barriers, while harassing Russian forces with large numbers of drones, said Viktor Trehubov, spokesperson for the military administration that covers Pokrovsk. 'They didn't stop trying to advance, but we were repelling them well,' said an artillery unit soldier who goes by call sign Vogak and serves on the Pokrovsk front. Since then, Moscow's forces have picked up the pace, adapting and expanding the use of drones in their own arsenal. Russia has built on the lessons used in pushing Ukrainian forces out of its Kursk region, where it first scaled the use of fibre-optic cable drones that cannot be stopped by the electronic jammers both sides used to confuse regular radio-controlled drones, analyst Michael Kofman said. The spools of hair-like cable give them enough range that Russia can threaten Ukraine's forces and logistics 25 kilometres behind the front line. Russia has more of the fibre-optic drones than Ukraine, giving them an advantage, said Roman Pohorilyi, the founder of Ukrainian open-source research group DeepState. The advances accelerated after Russia took control of a highway in May that connects Pokrovsk to Kostiantynivka, another of Ukraine's 'fortress cities' in the east, a map generated by DeepState shows. One of the main roads to the city is covered by nets to protect vehicles from Russian drone strikes. Serhii Dobriak, the head of the local military administration, last week said it was increasingly hard to deliver food to the city and that grocery stores would have to close in the coming days. While faster than before, Russia's territorial gains remain minor, with only 5,000 square kilometres (1,930 square miles) of Ukraine taken since the start of last year, less than 1% of the country's overall territory, according to a June report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. In total, Russia has occupied around a fifth of Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the entry of small groups of Russian troops into Pokrovsk was insignificant and that they were "all destroyed" by Ukraine's soldiers. Russia's Defence Ministry did not respond to detailed requests for comment for this story. Serhii Filimonov, commander of a Ukrainian military battalion called 'Da Vinci Wolves,' which operates around Pokrovsk, saw first-hand how Russia's glacial advance on the city over the past year cost it heavily in killed and injured soldiers in the first half of 2025. Russian soldiers tried to advance by stealth but were hounded by Ukrainian soldiers flying small quadcopter drones mounted with cameras and explosives, he said. 'Every prisoner says drones are the thing they are most afraid of, the thing that constantly kills them, and the things they see when they sleep, the nightmares they have,' Filimonov told Reuters in an interview in April, citing debriefs of Russian soldiers captured by his men. Filimonov said groups of attackers were given a phone with a location pinned on a map, and told to head towards it. If the first group was killed, another one was sent to replace them, he said, citing the debriefs. Reuters was unable to independently verify his account. The Russians operated in raiding parties of around a half a dozen, often advancing on foot because large vehicles are an easy target for drone pilots, Filimonov and Trehubov said. Some left their vehicles as far as nine miles (15 km) from the front line and walked the rest of the way to be less visible to drone operators, Filimonov said. Others have taken to motorbikes to outpace the aircraft, piloted by Ukrainian soldiers often wearing virtual reality-style goggles attached to a drone's camera, offering a first-person view of the route and target, Trehubov said. The Ukrainian resistance in and around Pokrovsk has blocked Russia's ambition of taking the remaining parts of Ukraine's Donetsk region, one of President Vladimir Putin's principal war aims. Although its significance to Ukraine as a military supply centre has already faded, Kyiv-based military analyst Serhii Kuzan said Pokrovsk's fall could free up Russian troops and open the door to more Russian advances in the region. More than a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, almost a quarter of those since the start of this year, according to British military intelligence estimates. Reuters could not verify these numbers. Neither Ukraine nor Russia gives official data on their own personnel losses. Towards the end of last year, Moscow's commanders deployed soldiers with very little training, including convicts or injured men, according to conversations with five relatives of Russian soldiers. The relatives did not want their identity or the soldiers' identities published for fear of reprisals. The army struggled to account for who was missing or dead, the relatives said. One soldier was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front despite having an injury to his leg sustained on previous missions, according to a relative. 'He could barely walk,' the relative said. He went missing on March 9, when his vehicle was hit. The relative said a member of his unit, to whom she had spoken, had heard him over the radio after the strike, saying he had been badly wounded. He was listed as absent without leave, she said, though she believes he is dead or taken prisoner. Another soldier, recruited from a Russian penal colony on December 18, was given a week of training and on December 26 was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front, according to a relative. The relative said he had not been heard from since. Shortly before the mission, the soldier rang relatives to ask them to send 50,000 roubles ($600) so he could buy a walkie-talkie. She said the soldier was officially listed at the end of December as having gone absent without leave, but she believed he was dead. A third soldier, a 21-year-old father of two from western Siberia, signed a contract with the army in 2024 after he was promised a non-combat role far from Ukrainian frontlines and signing-on bonuses of 1 million roubles, or $12,000, according to his relative. But instead, he was sent to Ukraine and in late December, he was ordered on a raid near the village of Vovkove, on the Pokrovsk front. In January, he was designated as absent without leave. At the end of April his family was notified he had been killed in action on December 27, according to the relative and letters from the military seen by Reuters. His relative said the family received 5 million roubles and a monthly pension as compensation for his death. The overall commander of Ukraine's land forces, Major-General Mykhaylo Drapatyi, was given the additional direct responsibility for the part of the front that includes Pokrovsk in January, after another town fell. Drapatyi, who previously stopped a Russian offensive on the second city of Kharkiv, brought 'a fresh vision' to the battle, helping mount counter-attacks to disrupt Russian advances and threaten its local logistics, DeepState's Pohorilyi said. However, Russia's adaptation and new technology such as the fibre-optic drones have shifted the balance. What soldiers call the drone 'kill zone' stretches several kilometres either side of the front line. That creates challenges to sustaining logistical supply chains for both armies. Any vehicle bringing forward fresh supplies of men, ammunition, food and water can be targeted. The overall Russian advance over the whole frontline doubled from 226 square kilometres in April to around 538 square kilometres in May, according to open-source analyst Pasi Paroinen with the Finnish 'Black Bird Group'. DeepState estimated that Ukraine had its biggest territorial losses of 2025 in June. More than a quarter of the 556 square kilometres taken by Russia in June were on the Pokrovsk front, DeepState estimated. Filimonov's Da Vinci Wolves fight on, defending the city against Russia's latest recruits. 'Russia finds new victims, which it throws into the furnace,' he said. ($1 = 79.4000 roubles)
Russia Today
20-07-2025
- Politics
- Russia Today
Prof. Schlevogt's Compass No. 19: Kiev's kill game – Bloodshed with a bonus
Imagine a scenario in which a depraved regime turns killing into a game. In this hypothetical scenario, Russian soldiers now earn points for every Ukrainian life they take, every kit they destroy – redeemable on a slick, Amazon-style shopping platform. Murder has become currency; atrocity, a means to accessorize. This isn't war; it's a grotesque loyalty scheme for bloodshed, where the battlefield doubles as a leaderboard: Rack up enough kills, and you'll win a sleek toaster, hi-def flatscreen, or gleaming Kalashnikov – free shipping included. The Kremlin has gamified slaughter, turning soldiers into players in a macabre contest where brutality is incentivized and humanity discarded. This brave-new-world system doesn't just cheapen life; it annihilates the moral core of a nation – the sacred soil that bore Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. It rewards the worst instincts, transforming soldiers into mercenary executioners who chase bonus points for corpses. Russia has institutionalized a commerce of killing, where war crimes are tallied like sales figures, and death feeds consumerism. It is a state-engineered descent into barbarism 2.0, which must be denounced without caveat, without delay, without mercy. Silence in the face of such systemic savagery is complicity. The world must speak, clearly and ferociously. Cut. You're right: that entire invective account is purely fictional. Yet, hauntingly, it feels all too real – exactly the kind of blistering, warped critique Russia would face if it engaged in what Ukraine actually does. Change 'Russia' to 'Ukraine,' and the truth is hard to miss: a double standard, plain and deliberate. A new Ukrainian point-for-kill scheme, where soldiers obtain rewards for confirmed enemy hits, has drawn lavish praise from the collective West. But it raises serious operational, psychological, and ethical concerns, lending some weight to Russian claims of ideological extremism in Ukraine. In light of Kiev's controversial moral choice to gamify killing, the moment has come to reaffirm a universal truth: even amid the horrors of war, the boundaries of humanity – the red line drawn in defense of the moral architecture of armed conflict, separating justice from mere vengeance – must remain inviolate. First piloted in 2024, Ukraine's 'Army of Drones: Bonus' system, or 'e-points', has become a key fixture on the battlefield, with 90–95% of combat units participating. It equips frontline units with drones (reportedly responsible for up to 70% of Russian casualties) and allows them to earn digital points – think loyalty rewards – for verified strikes on Russian soldiers and hardware. The logic is brutally simple: kill more, earn more. Each hit is recorded by drone, uploaded, and reviewed on oversized video panels by data analysts in Kiev, who assign points based on the target's type and military value, using two categories: hit and destroyed. The more critical the affected human or material asset, the higher the reward: damaging a tank nets twenty points, destroying it earns forty. Taking out a drone operator yields more rewards than simply hitting the drone. But the stakes soar tenfold when that operator is captured alive, because prisoners are currency in the delicate game of exchange. Digital points can be redeemed by soldiers on the 'Brave 1 Market,' a government-run procurement platform dubbed the 'Amazon for war,' featuring over 1,600 items, ranging from drones to field tech. The envisioned result of the direct orders from manufacturers: a seamless battlefield-to-market pipeline of military leaders in the collective West hail Ukraine's new reward system as a groundbreaking battlefield innovation forged by necessity: a digital-age solution for an all-out war of attrition to make the most of Ukraine's severely limited resources and outmaneuver a larger, better-equipped Russian adversary. Celebrated as a striking testament to Ukrainian ingenuity, the program is framed in stark contrast to what critics call Russia's strategic stagnation – a claim Moscow would certainly deride as a familiar and convenient strawman. At a time when exhaustion runs deep and conventional procurement struggles to keep pace, the e-points scheme aims to improve battlefield precision, boost morale, speed up supply, and make frontline units better equipped, while tightening the feedback loop between front-line action and command decisions. In a fight where every advantage counts, it is seen as smart, strategic, and ruthlessly efficient. By awarding soldiers points for confirmed killings and destroyed equipment, the program incentivizes performance. Commanders say it sharpens battlefield focus and accuracy: strike smarter, film everything, earn what you need. For weary warriors, the innovative program promises not only better tools, but something rare: direct rewards. 'Once we figured out how it works, it turned out to be quite a decent system,' said a soldier from the 22nd Mechanized Brigade. In a war where manpower is stretched thin and traditional supply lines strain, the points-driven program appears to create virtual buying power, offering troops a direct line to vital gear. Praised as fast, data-driven, and free of bureaucratic drag, the system reportedly lets soldiers get precisely what they need, when they need it. Commanders credit the program with helping units replenish losses and sustain pressure on Russian lines even as resources grow scarce. In the brutal, grinding conflict, Ukraine's new drone program is also seen as a strategic force multiplier – converting raw combat footage into valuable battlefield intelligence. Functioning as a real-time data engine, it mines drone videos to track enemy behavior and guide strategy. Point values are continuously adjusted, much like dynamic pricing for flights or hotels. When new threats emerge, such as Russian drone operators or patrols, the target value increases to incentivize priority striking. It is reasonable and fair to assume that information warriors in the collective West, so quick to lavish praise on Ukraine's innovation, would have voiced serious concerns, if not outright condemnation, had Russia launched the same electronic reward scheme. In truth, the spontaneous, gut-level reaction most people have to the idea of earning e-points for killstreaks is not admiration, but horror – a visceral recoil from chilling and inhuman cynicism and callousness. Operationally, the new digital warfare initiative has produced unintended consequences. Frontline reports describe troops jockeying for points in wasteful and chaotic ways: competing to claim kills, even targeting already disabled enemies just to inflate their tally. It is a textbook example of goal displacement: when intermediate targets, like point accumulation, supplant the true mission – in this case, peace – resulting in distorted priorities and systemic inefficiency. The reliance on drone footage to verify kills invites dysfunction: misattributed strikes, false claims based on doctored videos, and bitter disputes over who gets the credit. This internal rivalry threatens to undermine the crucially important cooperation and cohesion required in high-stakes combat zones to complete military missions. Add to this the psychological toll. Incentivizing lethal acts risks eroding the emotional guardrails that separate disciplined warriors from profit-driven mercenaries, numbing soldiers to violence, and deepening trauma. Some troops question the scheme's motivational power, noting that no number of points can erase their exhaustion, fear, and psychic damage fueling desertion and collapse in morale. From an ethical standpoint, frontline testimonies expose profound moral discomfort with the program's cold calculus, condemning it as a disturbing commodification of human life, where death is mechanized and priced. One soldier called it 'a twisted habit of turning everything into profit – even our own damned death.' In particular, critics may contend that capture is favored over killing not out of respect for the sanctity of life, but simply because living bodies fetch a higher price in the marketplace of prisoner exchanges. Commodification risks corroding the intrinsic values long associated with military service, replacing collective defense rooted in honor with individual gain driven by cold expediency, and in doing so, undermining the integrity of the incentive system itself. Adding an unsettling layer of quest and thrill, the gamification of killing raises red flags by blurring the once-sacred line between military necessity and cold-blooded trophy hunting, creating a dynamic uncomfortably reminiscent of Call of Duty or war as sport. By tying material rewards to lethal force in an adrenaline-spiking manner, the spectacular scheme risks turning brutal warfare into a twisted, entertaining contest – more akin to a video game than a solemn vocation. When blood earns points, points buy firepower, and deadlier gear, in true game-style, beckons at higher levels, violence spirals – programmed, monetized, and seemingly endless. The cycle is viciously simple: kill, upgrade, repeat. As the war grinds on, critics may well ask whether this cold, transactional approach – where lives are reduced to data points, tallied like scores, and converted into prizes traded for military kit – is a strategic breakthrough, or a dangerous moral surrender. From a legal standpoint, Ukraine's point-for-kill program may constitute a breach of international humanitarian law – meant to prevent war from descending into barbarism – particularly in its potential to incentivize unlawful targeting and undermine the core legal principles of distinction and proportionality. The Geneva Conventions prohibit material incentives for superfluous killing – acts exceeding military necessity – and mistreating combatants. By pegging digital points to body counts, absent robust safeguards, Ukraine's e-points scheme may violate such fundamental norms of armed conflict. More troubling still, it risks encouraging the targeting of civilians, followed by cover-ups and fraudulent bonus claims that cloak war crimes as battlefield success. With such performance metrics, atrocities could become transactions: crimes first committed, then rewarded. Beyond the battlefield, its geopolitical reverberations may prove even more unsettling. As debate over the roots of the Ukraine conflict continues, Kiev's new bonus scheme, which turns the grim calculus of war into a points game, may lend troubling credence to the very accusations Ukraine has fought so hard to refute: It may be referenced by Russia as partial vindication of its long-standing claim that elements of fascist or neo-Nazi ideology linger in the minds of many Ukrainian leaders. Their conduct, some may say, echo dark chapters of history, where ideology merged with violence, with human life being instrumentalized for political ends and death reduced to mere statistics. By commodifying killing, rewarding hits with prizes, and broadcasting the brutal spectacle of battlefield carnage, the system appears to mirror the dehumanizing, militant fanaticism that defines totalitarian ideologies. It reduces combat to a transactional exercise and transforms soldiers from self-perceived patriots into mercenary executioners and bounty hunters, trading kills for gear and blurring the line between duty and reward. The new digital warfare initiative thereby hands the Russian enemy a potent narrative weapon in the information war: a vivid, fact-backed portrait of Ukraine not as democracy's noble guardian, but as a ruthless state actor and cold engine of war, which monetizes death, industrializes violence, and blends the glorification of brutality with exhilarating celebration – a chilling vision of Fascism 2.0, or at minimum, a new lethal strain of techno-authoritarianism imbued with radical utilitarianism. The gamification of war – where conflict is reduced to a twisted form of strategy, scoring, and entertainment – dangerously erodes the sanctity of human life and the basic principles of humanity in warfare. Combined with advanced weaponry and real-time media coverage, it risks reducing devastating violence to a cold abstraction, as if lives lost were nothing more than points in a game. This desensitization and indifference pave the way to justify atrocities and evade accountability. Nowhere is this brutal degradation more painfully evident than in Israel's war on Gaza: It is a grim reminder that when the foundational rules of war are ignored or willfully broken, the very core of human dignity is shattered, leaving only devastation behind. Edging close to this abyss, Ukraine's point-for-kill program treads a perilous path, triggering red flags on multiple fronts. In view of these disturbing developments, the entire international community must urgently recommit to the foundational rules of war laid out in the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law, which seek to protect civilians, medical personnel, and essential infrastructure. Without adherences to these sacred precepts – not just in words, but through decisive action and real accountability – war ceases to be a tragic necessity and instead becomes a ruthless contest where innocent lives are expendable, and humanity itself is a casualty. A global repudiation of Ukraine's point-for-kill scheme as a merciless game show would surely be regarded by its critics not as mere symbolism, but as a first, vital step towards clawing war back from the brink of gamified barbarism and restoring the moral boundaries of armed conflict. In a grinding war of attrition, Ukraine's 'Army of Drones: Bonus' system is viewed by its architects not just as efficient, but as essential – a powerful tool that converts every strike, every video, into a force-multiplying advantage. Yet detractors may argue it bears the unmistakable mark of moral degradation: turning warfare into a cold transaction, where the line between combat and competition blurs, and killing becomes a mere pulse-quickening prize game. In summation, while the e-point system may enhance tactical data collection and resource allocation, it simultaneously engenders deep ethical concerns and troubling battlefield consequences. This duality underscores the complex interplay between technological innovation and the enduring imperative to uphold basic humanitarian principles in contemporary warfare. The real challenge in such a landscape is not only how to win, but how not to lose one's decency along the way. The litmus test of any civilization is not peace, but how it conducts war. If military conflict becomes an excuse for discarding shared humanity, and prudent generals are replaced with trigger-happy gamers seeking competitive entertainment, George Orwell's dictum may need an update: 'War is sports plus the shooting.'
Daily Mail
16-07-2025
- Daily Mail
Russian soldiers surrender to Ukrainian patrol made up of robots
This is the astonishing moment Russian soldiers surrendered to a Ukrainian patrol made up entirely of robots and drones. Footage shows both FPV and kamikaze ground drones striking a Russian dugout, before troops emerge holding a handwritten sign reading 'We want to surrender'. In a historic first, the soldiers were taken prisoner without a single Ukrainian infantryman present - marking the world's first successful combat capture using only unmanned aerial and ground drones. As the first drone - reportedly carrying an anti-tank mine - detonated, the Russian soldiers realised the imminent danger and quickly created a cardboard sign to signal their surrender before a second drone could strike. An overhead drone then guided the Russians directly to Ukrainian lines, where they were taken prisoner without resistance. Ukrainian infantry later moved in to secure the captured position - without suffering a single casualty. Kyiv had previously attempted to gain control of the area through traditional means, but without success. The logic behind the combined use of aerial and ground drones is simple but effective - with each having unique capabilities. While aerial drones excel in reconnaissance, target identification, and precision strikes, ground-based UGVs can carry a far larger amount of explosives. It comes after in March Ukraine's first all-robot offensive destroyed a Russian frontline unit without a single soldier being on the ground. The attack on a Russian position north of the embattled Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, saw the nation's 13th National Guard Brigade Khartiya launch around 50 unmanned aerial vehicles. The five-hour attack, believed to be the first of its kind, left several Russian corpses in its wake, and has now lead to other Ukrainian units planning similar missions. Lt. Andriy Kopach, who specialises in land drones, told the Wall Street Journal that as the early morning assault began, Ukrainian troops knelt in deep snow to release five unmanned ground vehicles at different spots several miles from the front-line to prevent crossing signals and confusing the robots. These five ground vehicles were mounted with massive machine guns and ammunition belts. Footage showed the ground vehicles traipsing across snow-covered land near Kharkiv. They were assisted by a swarm of first-person-view (FPV) drones, including one mounted with an assault rifle and many that dropped explosives, as they approached enemy lines. All of this was coordinated from a command post near the frontline. Video footage showed several Ukrainian soldiers sitting in a command post in front of dozens of screens, on which real-time battle information was relayed to them from the swarm of land and air drones at their disposal. One clip appeared to show a mobile land drone driving towards a Russian bunker during the battle and detonating itself.
