Killing for Points: How Ukraine’s Gamified War Hits Home in Malta

Killing for Points: How Ukraine’s Gamified War Echoes Through Malta’s Living-Rooms

The WhatsApp voice note crackled over the loudspeaker at Ħamrun’s Busy Bee café during Wednesday morning’s pastizzi rush. “They’re shooting people for TikTok likes now,” the message claimed, relaying a cousin’s footage from Kharkiv of Russian soldiers allegedly uploading kill-shots to a Telegram bot in exchange for cryptocurrency bounties. Within minutes the clip had ping-ponged through Valletta office groups, Mellieħa parish chats, and the University gaming society’s Discord. By lunchtime Times of Malta had run a headline quoting the same video, and by evening NET TV’s bulletin opened with the phrase “killing for points”—a grim new idiom now lodged in the Maltese vernacular, right between “ħamalli” and “kollox politika”.

Malta, 2,300 kilometres from the nearest Ukrainian trench, has never been closer to the front line. Our islands’ dense networks of family, Facebook and festa mean that a drone strike on Bakhmut can feel as immediate as a traffic jam on Regional Road. There are 1,800 Ukrainian nationals with Maltese residence cards, and another 500 Russian passport-holders who arrived via the 2013 citizenship scheme. Every village has at least one “Ukraine kitchen” fund-raiser, every band club stores boxes of baby formula bound for Lviv, and every household knows someone who has driven a second-hand Peugeot Partner packed with tuna tins across the Slovakian border. The war is not abstract; it is woven into the lace of our everyday.

The “gamification” of killing—soldiers reportedly earning points for confirmed kills, redeemable for e-gift cards or even holidays in Dubai—has struck a particularly raw nerve in a country that has spent the past decade gamifying everything from traffic fines (speed-camera league tables) to village festa pyro-technics. “We turned fireworks into a competition with points and prizes; why are we shocked when someone else turns murder into one?” asks Dr Maria Camilleri, lecturer in digital culture at the University of Malta. Her students, raised on Fortnite and FIFA Ultimate Team, recognise the mechanics instantly. “They see kill-streaks, leaderboards, loot boxes. They understand the logic—just not the morality.”

That creeping moral unease spilled into the open last Saturday during the Nadur Carnival. A group of teenage Gozitans arrived dressed as “Ukrainian Snipers”, complete with cardboard drones and Nerf guns. Their banner—“Top Fragger 2024”—was torn down within minutes by a Ukrainian family who have been living in Xagħra since March 2022. The scuffle, filmed and posted to TikTok, racked up 400,000 views in 48 hours, eclipsing the usual carnival content of drunken banana costumes. “We came here to feel safe,” says Olena Petrenko, mother of two, “not to see our trauma turned into carnival cosplay.”

The incident forced Archbishop Charles Scicluna to address the issue during Sunday Mass at St John’s Co-Cathedral. “War is not a video game, and human lives are not tokens,” he told the congregation, which included the Ukrainian ambassador on an official visit. Later that week, the Malta Gaming Authority issued a rare statement reminding licensed operators that hosting or promoting “kill-for-points” content on Maltese-registered platforms violates both EU sanctions and local anti-crime legislation. The Authority’s sudden moral tone was jarring to industry insiders more accustomed to debates about Return-to-Player rates.

Yet Malta’s connection to the conflict is not only digital. The island’s small but tight-knit Ukrainian community gathers every Friday evening outside the Russian Embassy in San Ġwann, holding candles and singing the national anthem while passing motorists beep in solidarity. Last month they were joined by members of the Malta Gay Rights Movement, linking the invasion to broader struggles for freedom. Meanwhile, Russian-language schools in Sliema report dwindling enrolments as families quietly re-register under Moldovan or Kazakh documents. “We feel the chill,” says one St Petersburg-born mother, pushing her child on a Floriana swing set. “Even the playground politics have changed.”

As the war enters its third year, the phrase “killing for points” has become Maltese shorthand for any act that reduces humanity to metrics—whether that’s a Russian soldier uploading bodycam footage or a Maltese employer tracking warehouse workers’ toilet breaks. It is a reminder that, in our hyper-connected archipelago, front lines are no longer geographical. They run through our newsfeeds, our classrooms, our carnival parades. The challenge for Malta is to keep recognising the human being behind every pixelated statistic—before we too start awarding points.