24 October 2026

You can win by developing science, culture, and diplomacy, or by conquering other countries’ capitals. The latter is far more costly and leads to enormous destruction and suffering. This is the alternative in the famous game “Civilization.” In our reality, the fields near the Ukrainian town of Dobropillia are strewn with the bodies of Russian soldiers, and one wonders how much better the world would be today if Putin had satisfied his imperial ambitions with a mouse in his hand.

I really love Civilization, especially the fifth installment. I recently saw in my  Steam account that I’ve spent a total of 3,218 hours playing Civilization since 2010. And that’s not surprising. For me, Civilization isn’t just a way to unwind: while playing, I simultaneously relax and think—formulating future texts, discussing ideas with myself. Civilization is an intellectual game, and in a sense, it’s understandable why it helps with thinking: it’s a kind of advanced chess.

In case you weren’t aware, Civilization was created in 1991 by an American game designer named Sid Meir. The game became a cult classic, and a seventh installment was recently released. In just 35 years, it has sold 77 million copies—a colossal feat for a strategy game.

The game’s plot is very simple. You choose a country and a historical leader and lead it through a journey from the Stone Age to the conquest of space. Your choices determine what kind of nation you will become. You decide what to develop: science, trade, diplomacy, or culture. You decide whether you will aggressively expand, waging war on your neighbors, or strive to survive until the 21st century and the advent of humanoid combat robots through purely peaceful means.

You can win in different ways :

• you can win the UN vote and achieve a diplomatic victory;
• it is possible to create a culture that influences all competing civilizations and achieve a cultural victory;
• a scientific victory can be achieved by launching a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri;
• It will finally be possible to capture all the capitals of our competitors simply by force of arms and nuclear weapons. This will be a military victory.

And no matter how long I’ve been playing, I always end up with either a scientific or diplomatic victory. Because developing science and getting rich is much more fun than fighting. But most importantly, war is incredibly expensive; you have to keep your entire civilization in a constant state of tension, shift your economy to a war footing, and sacrifice science and culture for military goals. It’s tedious and not very effective, even if your army size allows it. It’s much more fun to win the space race.

I don’t get to play very often, but I think about the game “Civilization” literally every day, reading the chronicles of the war that Russia has been waging in Ukraine for five years.

What’s the connection?  It’s not hard to understand.

Recently, Ukrainian Telegram channels published a drone video of killing fields somewhere near Dobropillia. In this case, the term “killing fields” is not an exaggeration. The drone is monitoring a path along which the bodies of fallen Russian soldiers lie. There are so many bodies. At some point, you even lose count of how many there are.

Then a similar video was published by the Z channel, one of the largest, “Two Majors,” with over 1.17 million subscribers. The setting is the same, only filmed from the ground rather than from the air. It features an unnamed soldier walking the path of death past the bodies of his comrades.

“The bodies of the dead , scattered belongings , spent cartridges , abandoned equipment . Nothing here is staged. This is the real, unvarnished face of war. Next to one of the dead lie cartridges. Perhaps until the last minutes, he tried to shoot back, hoping to survive. A little further away lies a half-open backpack with a radio. At one point, they prepared it for use, intending to use it at the position, making plans for the following days. And nearby is another body, bound with tourniquets. The man probably knew how to provide first aid to himself, learned how to stop bleeding. But even this knowledge is not always able to save a life,” wrote the author of the “Two Majors” channel.

I’ve seen hundreds of such horrific videos during the war . That’s not to mention the far more heartbreaking videos filmed daily in Ukrainian cities after Russian missiles or drones land. Videos of rubble being cleared, the bodies of fallen civilians, and children being buried.

But it’s the video of the dead Russian soldiers that makes me think of “Civilization,” especially the one filmed from above, where they look so much like units in a computer game.

But they weren’t units; they were people. Yes, soldiers of an occupying army in a criminal war, but people nonetheless.

The authors of the Z-channels I read and analyze also watched this video, of course. Just like hundreds, if not thousands, of other similar videos. But their conclusion is the opposite: not “stop the senseless slaughter,” but “appoint competent commanders who won’t waste personnel senselessly.” In other words, not end the war, but make it more effective. Continue killing.

And at moments like these, it’s simply impossible not to imagine a world in which someone had taught Putin how to play “Civilization. And instead of churning out endless corpses on battlefields and razing peaceful cities to rubble, he’d be sitting in the Kremlin with a laptop, a mouse, and a bottle of kefir, satisfying his imperial ambitions with the game.

After all, how much better the world would be under such a scenario!

That’s how it works: politicians often and loudly claim that computer games provoke violence. In reality, the most terrible war in Europe in decades was started by people who don’t even know how to turn on a computer.

It would be better if they could do it. It would be better if they played it.

https://ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/24/daite-putinu-mish-a209520