How Polymarket war betting is putting civilians at risk by disrupting humanitarian aid maps

The first thing many Ukrainians check in the morning is not Instagram or email, it is a war map. DeepStateMap.Live, a volunteer-built OSINT project, shows which villages are under occupation, where Ukrainian advances hold, and where the front looks fragile. It’s a survival tool as much as a news product, funded by donations and backed by a cooperation agreement with the Ministry of Defense to keep its view of the battlefield accurate.

Now imagine that same map, draped over a glossy 3D globe called PolyGlobe, with little icons marking Polymarket contracts like “Will Russia capture Huliaipole by December 31?” When you hover over the bet, the exact neighborhood lights up. The area where someone’s parents live is the area where someone else has “Yes” odds priced to three decimal places.

That’s the dichotomy this story lives in: a wartime public good on one side, and a crypto prediction platform with real-money wagers on captured towns on the other.

In late November, a Ukrainian tech outlet reported that Pentagon Pizza Watch, the pseudonymous team behind PolyGlobe, had integrated DeepState’s API directly into its war-betting dashboard without permission. The map, the article said, was being pulled into a Polymarket visualization tool so that traders could see shaded control zones, unit icons, and attack arrows directly under their war bets, a “first-of-its-kind OSINT market tracker” built on top of someone else’s wartime infrastructure.

DeepState UA, the group behind the map, reacted within hours. In a public statement relayed through local media and social channels, they said they had never authorized any betting service to plug into DeepStateMap and called the use of their work in war gambling unacceptable, adding that third parties were probably accessing the data through a free API intended for humanitarian and military needs or via scrapers.

Pentagon Pizza Watch apologized and removed the integration, claiming they assumed a public endpoint was fair game. While relatively brief, the issue opened a deeper question that goes well beyond one plugin: what happens to open wartime tools when crypto markets start treating them as raw material for bets, while both Ukrainian and Russian families bury the dead from drone strikes and artillery fire?

When the frontline becomes a futures contract

Polymarket has leaned hard into geopolitical and war markets. According to reporting from dev.ua, in November, there were roughly 100 active contracts tied to the Russia–Ukraine war, from whether Russian troops would capture Pokrovsk or Myrnohrad by year’s end to when a ceasefire might finally hold, with about 97 active war bets and nearly $96.8 million in volume. A trader clicking into these markets finds language that looks more like a rules appendix than a forum about human lives.

In multiple contracts, Polymarket explicitly names the Institute for the Study of War’s interactive Ukraine map as the primary resolution source and DeepStateMap.Live as a backup if ISW becomes unavailable. If both maps go offline, the plan is to fall back to a “consensus of credible reporting.” In other words, the frontline map millions of Ukrainians use to understand whether their village is under occupation is written into the fine print of an on-chain casino as a kind of oracle of record.

Supporters of prediction markets will say this is the point. Their pitch is that you crowdsource probabilities from people willing to put money on the line, the markets digest all available information, including live OSINT feeds, and what comes out is a cleaner read on the future than any political pundit can deliver. For long-term macro questions or election odds, that argument at least fits the usual “wisdom of crowds” story.

But war is a different category. Someone checking Polymarket to see if a ceasefire has a 5% or 10% price this month is consuming a financial product. Someone checking DeepStateMap to see whether Russian artillery is near their town is trying to decide if they can drive their kids to school, just as someone in Kursk or Belgorod is trying to figure out whether Ukrainian drones are going to hit a fuel depot near their apartment.

This is a conflict that has already left tens of thousands of civilians dead. Different sources report different numbers, but the consensus is that there are more than 50,000 recorded civilian casualties in Ukraine alone, and likely well over a million soldiers on both sides killed or wounded. One side of the market is taking risks voluntarily, while the other is exposed to violence forcefully. When the two collapse into the same stack of tools, some of the distance that normally separates speculation from real-world harm disappears.

The PolyGlobe integration pushed that logic to its natural endpoint. The dev.ua report quotes the Pentagon Pizza Watch team saying that geographic war markets “constantly confuse people,” and that draping DeepState’s map over their globe would clear that up by letting users hover over a region and see “the exact area of the transaction where it is being resolved.” No more quibbling over whether a station really counts as “captured,” just zoom in and watch the map repaint in near-real time as troops move. It’s a neat little UX trick for a trader, and a stomach-turning one if that shaded district happens to be where someone you know is serving.

To be clear, Polymarket didn’t write the PolyGlobe code and never claimed to be scraping DeepState’s API. Its war markets, though, sit at the center of an orbit of tools and plugins that are, and the platform sets the basic incentive structure that makes those tools profitable.

When a third-party dashboard wraps humanitarian OSINT around Polymarket markets, it’s doing so to increase trading volume, attract more users, and make the gambling smoother for people speculating on the capture of Ukrainian towns or the fall of another Russian-held village.

That’s not an accidental side effect of an innocent tool, just the business model doing exactly what it was designed to do.

When public goods meet private odds

DeepStateMap is a high-traffic, high-stakes information source: by early 2024, the map had been viewed more than a billion times, with daily traffic in the hundreds of thousands, and its team works with the Ukrainian military to cross-check frontline information so civilians and soldiers can see where the fighting actually is.

While most of the focus is on Ukrainian territory, the same war has brought drone and missile attacks to border regions in Russia, Crimea, and the Black Sea, killing and injuring civilians there as well; the UN has documented hundreds of civilian casualties in Western Russia and occupied Crimea linked to this conflict, even without full access to Russian-controlled areas.

It’s funded by a mix of donations and government support, and its API is intentionally oriented toward humanitarian uses, journalists, and civil defense. When DeepState UA says that “systematic attempts at unauthorized use” are forcing them to tighten API access, move to individualized keys, and spend time on intellectual property enforcement, they aren’t only talking about the annoyance of a scrape.

Every hour spent policing degens is an hour not spent improving the map, hardening it against DDoS, or building better overlays for air raid patterns and artillery range on either side of the border. It pushes a volunteer-heavy team into gatekeeping mode, reviewing requests and yanking keys, instead of treating their data as a shared public utility.

The bigger risk here is that, under enough abuse, projects like DeepState conclude that open endpoints are more trouble than they are worth. They can lock the API behind closed partnerships, slow down refresh rates, or degrade granularity in the public version. That might be rational self-defense for the team, but it looks very different if you are an NGO field worker, a local journalist, or a family trying to make route decisions based on where the front appears to be.

Polymarket’s own record doesn’t make this tension easier to swallow. Earlier this year, the platform dealt with a $7 million controversy over a market on whether Donald Trump would secure a mineral deal with Ukraine. The contract settled “Yes” even though no such agreement materialized, after a large holder of UMA governance tokens reportedly used their voting power to push through that outcome. If huge financial stakes can twist a niche geopolitical market about a hypothetical Trump deal, it is not hard to imagine similar games around war contracts that rely on subtle frontline changes.

That doesn’t mean prediction markets have no place in conflict analysis. Academics and policy types have experimented with war-related contracts for years, often inside controlled, low-stakes environments, to gauge expectations about outcomes like peace agreements or sanctions.

The Polymarket version of this is different in at least two ways: the money is big, with almost $100 million traded across Russian–Ukrainian war markets in a single month according to Ukrainian press, and the experience has been tuned for retail gamblers. The result is a hybrid product that borrows the language of “information markets” but feels, to the people whose lives sit under those price charts, like a sportsbook, just with better branding.

There is a more basic question hiding underneath all of this. Whose consent matters when turning a public map of a war into infrastructure for financial bets? The company that made it? Ukrainians? Russians?

DeepState UA built its project to help Ukrainians orient themselves in a conflict that has displaced millions and killed tens of thousands of civilians, while Russians are also losing relatives and friends to a war launched in their name that now sends Ukrainian drones toward their homes. The team has made it very clear that they do not want to be part of a wagering economy around territorial loss.

Polymarket and its satellite tools, by contrast, operate from a crypto culture where everything that can be priced will be, and where “degen” is worn as a badge rather than a slur. For one set of communities, war is an existential reality; for the other, it is a volatility source with an RSS feed.

The episode with PolyGlobe will fade from the news cycle. Pentagon Pizza Watch has already taken down the DeepState integration and promised not to touch the data without explicit permission. Polymarket’s war markets will keep trading, with their references to ISW and DeepState sitting in the rulebooks, and a fresh crop of users will keep discovering that they can bet on the fate of towns they have never heard of.

The real question is what gets left behind when prediction markets move from “Who wins the election” to “Who loses their home this quarter,” while Russia keeps firing cruise missiles at Ukrainian apartment blocks and Ukraine keeps launching drones into Russian cities that were once far from any front line.

If humanitarian mapping projects decide that betting platforms are parasitic, the likely move is to retreat: more friction, more locked-down data, fewer open feeds. That may frustrate degens, but they will find something else to gamble on. The people who cannot route around that withdrawal are the civilians who depend on clean, fast, open intelligence to navigate their days in their war-forsaken towns.

War betting defenders will say that markets only mirror reality, that odds on a ceasefire or a breakthrough in Donbass are just numbers. But those numbers are painted over their real places where real people live, and every bet written against that backdrop feels like one more small cut to the fragile trust that keeps civilians sharing information and volunteers updating maps. The dark side of Polymarket’s war games is the slow corrosion of a digital commons created to help people survive a war, now forced to spend its time protecting itself from those who would turn that war into a game.

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