In the West, video games are entertainment. Maybe addictive. Maybe a waste of time. Maybe a moral panic.
The Kremlin looks at the same screen and sees a labor market.
Because a drone war doesn’t just need brave men. It needs hands.
Steady hands. Fast hands. Hands trained to track movement in three dimensions, make micro-corrections, and stay calm while the image shakes and flickers.
That’s not a poetic description. That’s a gamer skill set.
And once you understand that, the line between a bedroom and a battlefield starts to look terrifyingly thin.
A teenager practices “aim” and “timing” for years—then one day the same reflexes are used to fly through a broken window and hit a real human being.
So here’s the question:
How did gaming in Russia stop being play… and become part of the war machine?
Today I’ll show you how Putin’s Russia is turning gaming culture into a conveyor belt—from lobbies and simulators to the front line.
Here’s our roadmap for today:
- Bedroom to Battlefield — how gamer reflexes became battlefield currency
- War Games — how the Kremlin builds propaganda into its own games
- The Global Draft — how recruiters go hunting in gaming spaces abroad
- The Cute Facade — how children are pushed from games toward drone work
- The Soviet Upgrade — why this is an old imperial habit with a new interface
Bedroom to Battlefield
A drone war creates a very strange labor market.
Russia no longer relies only on the old military virtues: discipline, courage, endurance, and obedience. Now it also needs the reflexes of a good gamer — fine motor control, comfort with digital technology, and the ability to follow a fast-moving object on a screen in real time.
That is why the line between a gamer’s room and a trench has become so thin.
What does an FPV drone pilot at the front actually do? He stares at a screen, makes tiny corrections, and reacts in a split second. He flies through a broken window, down a tree line, into a dugout. It is the same logic as a game, except the target bleeds.
A teenager who spent years learning how to track movement in three dimensions and keep his hands steady while the image jerks and flickers is not a finished soldier. But he is no longer raw material either. He already has one of the hardest pieces.
Russia understood this very quickly.
War Games
Once Russia understood that games could train useful reflexes, the next step was obvious.
Why wait for foreign companies to create something you could use? Why not build your own games from the ground up, with your own myths, your own heroes, and your own version of reality?
In late 2021, the Institute for Internet Development—IRI in Russian—announced support for games whose content should match “Russian mentality, culture, and values.” In the next two years, it allocated about 2.5 billion rubles to game projects.
And once the state starts procuring culture, culture stops being culture. It becomes infrastructure.
One flagship project was Smuta, released in 2024.
The game is set in the Time of Troubles and casts the player as a Russian noble fighting Polish invaders and their allies. On the surface, it is just historical fiction. But the message is very clear: Russia is pure, Russia is besieged, Russia is saved by strong patriots who defeat foreign-backed chaos. That formula is old enough to have cobwebs on it, but it still works. Dress it in swords and period costumes, and you can smuggle a very modern political lesson through an old story.
The funniest part, if anything here can be called funny, is that Smuta was heavily criticized even inside Russia. Reviewers called it unfinished, technically clumsy, and more like an interactive lecture than a real game.
But the point is not whether Smuta was good. The point is that the state wants a domestic industry that can carry ideology on command.
Then came Front Edge.
This one moves closer to the present: a military strategy game built around a direct clash between Russia and the United States in Eastern Europe. In other words, it takes the fantasy already sold on Russian television—that Russia is bravely confronting the West—and turns it into a playable scenario.
And then there is Sparta 2035.
This project launders the Wagner mercenaries through fiction. It centers on a Russian private military company operating in Africa. The story nudges the same worldview into place: Russia fights chaos, Russia has the right to intervene, Russia’s armed men are not predators but guardians.
By 2025, the mask dropped even further with Squad 22: ZOV.
This game was released on Steam in May 2025. According to its own description, it is based on the war in Ukraine and on the “real experience” of Russian veterans. The game’s narrative repeats the standard Kremlin fantasy of “liberation.” Its developers consulted participants in the war, including an officer involved in the siege of Mariupol. And, most tellingly, it was recommended by the Russian army as a basic infantry tactics manual for cadets and members of Yunarmiya—the state youth movement that mixes ideology with military training.
Many experts think Squad 22: ZOV is a weak product. Cheap graphics, clumsy execution, limited appeal. But they also make a sharper point: bad propaganda games are prototypes. They show what the state is trying to learn. How much can be pushed? What platforms will tolerate it? What new version might land better next time?
The state wants games like this to travel beyond Russia, as its recruitment effort already does.
Before we move on, I’d like to introduce my upcoming novel, The Snow Queen’s Spring.
The Global Draft
Once you understand that gamers are useful, but there are not enough of them at home willing to fight for you, you start shopping abroad.
In January 2026, Bloomberg revealed that Russia had targeted South African gamers through Discord. Those were young men in their twenties who were fans of Arma 3, a military simulation game.
They talked online with a recruiter who called himself “Dash.” Then they met in Cape Town. Then they went to the Russian consulate and flew through the UAE to Russia where they signed one-year contracts with the military.
They were told they could get Russian citizenship and continue their education. After basic training, one of them was sent to the front as an assistant grenade launcher operator. He stopped contacting his family in October 2024. Later, his relatives were told he had been killed in Luhansk region.
That is the journey. From Arma 3 to a coffin.
In a poorer country, in a fragile life, promises like citizenship, training, or a better future can sound almost respectable. That is what makes this method so effective.
And Russian recruitment effort keeps expanding to more games, communities, and platforms.
In 2023, reporting showed that pro-Kremlin propaganda had been surfacing in popular games and related communities, including Minecraft, Roblox, World of Tanks, World of Warships, Fly Corp, Armored Warfare, and War Thunder. Sometimes it took the form of maps, symbols, or staged celebrations. Sometimes it was chat culture. Sometimes forum posts. Sometimes whole virtual scenes that framed Russia as heroic, victimized, or destined to defeat “Nazis” and the West.
This matters because games do something ordinary media often cannot. They lower your guard.
A custom server, a user-made map, a military sim Discord, or a “historical” mission inside a game feels casual. Temporary. Not quite real. That is exactly why it works. The message enters sideways.
Minecraft is a good example because adults often treat it as harmless children’s terrain. But that innocence is precisely what makes it useful. Microsoft president Brad Smith had said the company was dealing with attempts by Russian agents to penetrate online gaming communities, including those linked to Minecraft.
There is also a structural reason this works. Modern gaming culture is borderless but not exactly governed. Millions of users move between games, voice chats, community servers, mods, and streams. The platform may be American. The server may be private. The player may be in South Africa, Serbia, Germany, or Brazil. A meme born in one language can show up in another two hours later. That makes enforcement messy and accountability even messier.
And this is where Russia gains an advantage from being shameless. It does not care that the tone feels childish or ridiculous. It cares that repetition works. Push enough symbols, jokes, maps, missions, and “ironic” slogans into a shared space, and eventually the atmosphere changes.
That’s especially disturbing when it happens on platforms mainly used by children. And that’s where the cruelest part comes in.
The Cute Facade
It is one thing to recruit adult gamers. It is another to start shaping children long before they are old enough to understand what they are being shaped for. And this is where modern Russia becomes very Soviet again.
In 2022, just months after the full-scale invasion began, a new platform for schoolchildren was launched in occupied Sevastopol. Its name was “Berloga,” or “Bear’s Den.” Officially, this had nothing to do with war. Children were told a fairy-tale story about intelligent bears defending themselves from bees on a fantasy planet.
But inside these games, kids learned to use drones to defend “energy honey” from waves of enemies. In another game, they learned to pilot quadcopters and deliver cargo to exact coordinates. Future versions promised even more: adjusting drone designs, building routes, and sharing code. It was wrapped in cute language, soft colors, and “educational” packaging. But the skill being rehearsed was very real.
This is not some fringe hobby run by weird dudes in a basement. “Berloga” sits inside a state-backed ecosystem tied to the Agency for Strategic Initiatives.
A child enters through play. Then comes the competition. Then the portfolio. Then the camp, the mentor, the internship. Then the request to solve a “dual-use” problem that everyone understands perfectly well.
That phrase matters: dual use.
The Insider’s investigation found teenagers openly describing how they were pushed to invent civilian cover stories for projects with obvious military value. One boy said they were told not to say directly that a project was for war. Another described kids helping model parts, mounts, and drop mechanisms for the front. One 13-year-old was teaching soldiers how to fly drones. A 16-year-old was building UAVs used to test electronic warfare systems. A 17-year-old got an offer from a lab that “works for the special military operation.”
So this is labor extraction from minors dressed up as talent development.
And then comes the mass scale.
In 2024, “Berloga” began cooperating with the revived Soviet-style military game “Zarnitsa 2.0.”
It created an online simulator called “Drone Academy,” where participants learned the basics of quadcopter piloting. According to the organizers, more than 240,000 schoolchildren and college students would complete this simulator.
Two hundred forty thousand. That’s industrial scale.
The age range is also telling. “Zarnitsa 2.0” includes participants from seven to twenty-one. They choose military roles for team play: squad commander, medic, sapper, war correspondent, UAV operator, even political instructor and assault trooper. They practice shooting, drone recon, and weapon handling.
The Soviet Upgrade
By pulling kids into the military, Russia didn’t actually invent anything new. It just upgraded an old script.
The Soviet state also wanted children early. It wanted their attention, their reflexes, their bodies, their sense of what was normal. It used schools, youth organizations, sports teams, military games, and patriotic rituals. It wrapped discipline in pride, play, and belonging. It told children that service was honor, readiness was virtue, and private life was always secondary to the needs of the state.
Putin’s Russia updated the interface.
Instead of Young Pioneer camps, there are tech camps. Instead of model airplanes, there are drone simulators. Instead of Soviet military-sports games, there is “Zarnitsa 2.0.” Instead of lectures about defending socialism, there are cute fantasy games about helping bears defend their magical resources. But the state logic underneath is almost embarrassingly old: catch them young, shape their instincts, reward obedience, and turn skill into service.
This is why I called it a conveyor belt. At one end, there is play. At the other end, there is war.
And in the middle, there is a whole series of seemingly harmless transitions. A flying simulator. A patriotic event. A state-backed game. A little bonus on an exam. A little praise for being useful. A little silence around what exactly this project is for.
That middle zone is where Russia does its best work.
Not every child becomes a fanatic. Most do not. But the state does not need total success. It only needs enough children to buy the story – and become excellent drone operators.
