Killing Data: Military AI in the Russo–Ukrainian War and its Implications for 21st-Century Imperialism

This article argues that killing is organized as the production of training data for military AI in the Russo–Ukrainian war. As eroding economic and technological monopoly pushes US-led imperialism toward open violence, the war serves as a laboratory for futuristic weaponry. On Brave1 Market, drone units earn points for uploading strike footage, which they can exchange for weapons, while the annotated data feeds an AI ecosystem shared with allied states. Building on Ali Kadri’s theory of accumulation by waste, this article calls this an “online waste platform” that pays piece wages for destruction while converting its record into constant capital for future targeting. Tracing US remote warfare from the Cold War to contemporary Ukraine, the article identifies further byproducts: forced waste-labor through surveillance and conscription, fascism as US-led imperialism’s peripheral political formation, and a CIA-backed proxy force active in West Africa and West Asia.