In a war of tanks, there is World of Tanks.
Somewhere along several hundred miles of the front line in Ukraine, a Ukrainian soldier is probably playing World of Tanks — the video game. A war hero recently admitted to playing the game although he had to open a new account after losing his login information. During an exercise in June, border guards were found playing outside Bakhmut, where one of the bloodiest battles of the war took place. And a tank crew spotted eating a quick lunch last year slapped a World of Tanks logo on the body of its T-80 main battle tank.
“I play occasionally, when I have a little free time,” said Lt. Nazar Vernyhora, who last year attracted public attention for his command of a real tank that destroyed armored personnel carriers and damaged a Russian tank in a battle outside Kyiv.
Starlink satellite internet is widespread on Ukraine’s battlefields, and soldiers have smartphones. The draw of mobile video games is obvious. War is often marked by long periods of boredom, so why go back to the soldiers’ endless favorite pastime — throwing small rocks at bigger rocks — when there’s World of Tanks?
The desire to play a violent video game in the midst of Europe’s most brutal land war since World War II may seem puzzling, but it represents an important way soldiers cope with the bloodshed in their surroundings: isolation.
But the game’s multiplayer — with two teams of tanks and other killing machines destroying each other on a virtual battlefield — is an eerie echo of the actual war going on around its uniformed player base. . Ukrainian tanks, and other armored vehicles, can sometimes be locked in bloody battles that their crews almost certainly experience as well.
There are two entries in the World of Tanks universe available to players in Ukraine: World of Tanks and World of Tanks Blitz. Both require an internet connection, but the latter is available to play on mobile devices. It is difficult to say exactly how popular the game is on the Ukrainian battlefield, and throughout Ukraine, because of the different platforms for games: PCs, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo and Mac computers.
However, during visits to the front lines of Ukraine by The New York Times, the game was often seen and talked about. Discussions with Ukrainian soldiers about their World of Tanks hobby yielded various explanations for the game’s draw.
Soldiers in a drone unit, however, outside the embattled eastern town of Siversk, Ukraine, recoiled at the idea of playing such a violent game because of the circumstances.
“Why would we play World of Tanks if it’s just here?” asked a soldier, referring to the real war. Instead they play FIFA, another soldier added, a nod to a popular soccer video game.
Many Ukrainian soldiers seem to feel differently. On a recent visit to his frontline position, Anton, a commander of a Ukrainian tank company entrenched outside the embattled city of Avdiivka, showed footage of a recent battle on his computer. His favorite clip was of a Russian tank that had been destroyed, its hull on fire and the turret blowing into the air.
When he minimized the video, there in the corner of his screen was the program icon for World of Tanks.
“I love World of Tanks,” he said with a shrug.
Sgt. Silver, a Ukrainian soldier in an artillery unit near the eastern town of Siversk who, like most, goes by his call sign or first name for safety reasons, knows the game’s popularity in the ranks. But he thought it was a hobby that started for many before the war and just carried over.
“On the other hand, it’s kind of an addiction,” he said, as he walked back from a yard where a Russian kamikaze drone nearly destroyed one of the brigade’s rocket artillery trucks a few weeks ago.
Wargaming Group, the company that created World of Tanks, had half of its servers supporting its Russian region, with others spread to the United States, Europe, Australia and China. On top two World of Tanks players with the highest income in the e-sports competition from 2011 to 2021 are Kirill Ponomarev, a Russian, and Dmytro Frishman, a Ukrainian. The two men were once on the same World of Tanks e-sports team.
World of Tanks Blitz saw its peak number of users in mid-December 2021, with more than 50,000 people simultaneously playing, according to SteamDB, a publicly available service that tracks video game users using the Steam application to play games. A week after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, that number dropped to around 31,000.
Mr. Frishman, 27, who now runs a game club in Kharkiv, Ukraine, said that the game probably decreased in popularity because the Wargaming Group was originally from Belarus and therefore pro-Russian. After last year’s raid, Wargaming Group, located in Cyprus since 2011, announced it would close its studio in Minsk, Belarus, and transfer operations there and in Russia to a separate company.
Part of the customer base of Mr. Frishman in the game club quickly became wounded soldiers recovering away from the front, playing violent games like PUBG, Counter-Strike and, of course, World of Tanks.
“It’s really hard for me to understand why they play these games,” said Mr. Frishman on Wednesday. “But then I realized they were relaxing, they were playing with their friends.”
About 120 miles from the club, outside the eastern city of Bakhmut, the tinny sound of digital explosions and tank treads came from a tree line. There, crouching in the gardens, were Honey, a border guard turned infantryman, and his companion. They both play World of Tanks on their phones. Their unit just finished training after leaving the front line.
When approached, they act like two raccoons caught in a trash can, dropping their phones. Yes, there are troops playing World of Tanks near the front too, they say.
Asked about the similarities between war and World of Tanks, Honey said that both rely on teamwork.
Elsewhere on the eastern front, Lieutenant Vernyhora, who was 21 years old when last year his tank was caught on video fighting a Russian opponent far superior to him, echoed Honey’s view.
“You’re kind of learning to work in a team and developing game tactics,” he said.
“I try to use the same maneuvers as in real life,” added Lieutenant Vernyhora, sitting atop one of his unit’s T-72 tanks, hidden under a dense tree.
His behavior in World of Tanks was interrupted when he lost his login information and, with it, access to his account. He also lost all the tanks he had unlocked in the game. Running into an armed Russian platoon was bad enough, but his withdrawal from the game, he joked, “was a disaster.”
Much of World of Tanks’ strategy relies on piloting a tank around battlefields that appear to be handpicked from World War II and other conflicts. Players rely on how fast, powerful and well-armed their tanks are compared to other players, and, just like in actual tank battles, can use terrain to mask and protect their armored sprites.
But even devotees of the game like Honey will be taught that in real life — especially in the shell-raked trenches of Ukraine’s eastern front — they have a different strategy: survival.
The closer you get to the shelling, Honey said, “even if there is internet, you really don’t want to play.”
Natalia Yermak, Dmitry Yatsenko and Dzvinka Pinchuk contributed reporting from the front line.