Photo Essay / Phenomenon

Ukrainian Volunteers Weave Camouflage and Care

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainians have been gathering to support the war effort by creating camouflage nets for fighters on the frontlines.

By Maryna Nading

8 Oct 2025

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A dark-green colored truck with yellow markings on its side and a rocket launcher mounted on top sits beneath a grove of leafy, green trees. The front of the truck is covered with loose netting mottled with various shades of green.

Volunteers make two main kinds of handmade camouflage with rich variation within each category. The first are large nets (sitky) for military vehicles and other objects, such as evacuation buses, dugouts, trenches, and air defense systems. Volunteers prefer lightweight, technical fabrics, but since these materials are expensive, they often rely instead on ripping up old clothing from their own wardrobes or secondhand stores. The resulting strips are woven into nets.

A humanoid figure covered from head to toe in a shaggy green suit stands beside a tree trunk, amid low, bright-green foliage.

The second kind of camouflage volunteers create are covers for individuals to wear over military uniforms or clothes. These are called kikimory (or kiky), named after the legendary Slavic mythological character Kikimora, a dangerous swamp dweller with invisibility powers. Like the fairytale character, handmade camouflage is meant to bestow a degree of invisibility upon wearers and their essential defenses.

In a brightly lit room with mint-green tiled walls, two women work at a large loom to weave loose netting of mottled black, yellow, green, and gray colors. On the floor at their feet are piles of fabric strips from which the netting is woven.

Sitky and kiky both begin with a wooden frame that stands on the floor, its height close to that of an average adult. Volunteers work while seated on wooden benches softened with a throw or an old blanket, or while standing, often changing their positions to ease the stiffness that comes with focused and repetitive handwork. Before the work can begin, volunteers must cut fabric into strips to be woven onto the base net or measure and cut segments of yarn. Ripping and cutting fabric for hours on end creates a veil of microscopic dust that gets into volunteers’ clothing, skin, eyes, and noses.

In a room with a window and mint-green tiled walls, a white-haired man wearing a plaid shirt stands at a large wooden loom weaving netting made from strips of white cloth. He smiles slightly.

The base net, similar to a fishing net, is hooked onto small nails that outline all four sides of the wooden frame, creating a tight canvas upon which the volunteers tie strips of fabric for sitky or sections of yarn for kiky. For sitky, novice weavers typically use a simple “pants” technique, a double knot with two ends hanging freely, while highly skilled weavers may use a more complex circular “snake” technique or an even more elaborate “pine tree” pattern. For kiky, weavers tie yarn to a corner of a cell with a stable knot, allowing two loose ends to fall on the front side to create a 3D effect. Weavers dub these “medical” knots, referring to strong sutures, akin to surgical ones, that are unlikely to come apart.

A large, loosely woven net of mottled white, brown, black, and green colors is draped on a loom and ripples profusely onto the floor.

A completed canvas is treated like fabric from which the volunteers create sleeves, bodices, hoods, and helmet covers. Volunteers take great care in selecting the choice of color. Weaving is a creative, even artistic, process that uses 8–10 different colors to achieve the desired seasonal camouflage effect. I was taught to use the palm of my hand to know when to switch to a different shade and to avoid straight lines. I was also told that good camouflage is more important than food for soldiers and that poorly made camouflage is worse than not wearing any, making the stakes of volunteers’ color choices exceedingly high.

A man with a shaved head, an olive green sweatshirt, and a dark T-shirt with a small, yellow insignia on it holds two bundles of greenish netting.

By the time the nets are whisked away to the frontlines, volunteers often say they feel a sense of kinship with soldiers they will likely never meet in person. Anthropologists have noted kinship is not only “lived … through care,” it is also “created through care.” Volunteers are entangled in webs of care in multiple ways, most directly in their regular, patient, monotonous, and often invisible labor of weaving. A senior volunteer called this benevolent orientation a “cosmic law” or sometimes simply “love”—sending good into the world to make a full circle and return, enriching everyone along the way.

Children's drawings, hand-knit mittens, and other small items lie on top of two narrow strips of dark green netting.

In recognition of the lethal danger soldiers face, volunteers offer those on the frontlines the kinds of gift-based care more commonly reserved for children. For example, volunteers often purchase special treats, such as candy, cookies, or cigarettes, or collect handmade children’s art to add to the bundles with camouflage nets traveling to the frontlines. Describing the phenomenon of gift-giving, a volunteer told me, “We want to do something nice for our boys. … This is a human factor. I think this is why we are still standing. Our country stands on the shoulders of people who understand this.”

Large piles of olive-green netting lie beneath a window in the hallway of an apartment.

This photo features a traditional embroidered towel, rushnyk, that frames an icon hung over the doorway of a volunteers’ workspace. Written directly on a dry wall is a partial list of completed camouflage in square meters. Rushnyk is a symbolically powerful item central in many Ukrainian rituals, including baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and people often adorn a prominent corner in their home with one to bring protection and prosperity. Through this and many other small acts, volunteers are unraveling their colonial past by centering their Ukrainian identity in making sense of the world.

A dark-haired woman wearing an olive green sweatshirt holds up a poster with Cyrillic letters on it. Behind her are piles of cardboard boxes full of strips of fabric.

Many volunteers actively interact with the public: They give interviews to the press, compose social media posts, and host school and college students who learn how to make camouflage. At the heart of this work is volunteers’ personal realization of the cultural erasure rampant during the Soviet era, and their effort to refashion an independent future. Here, a volunteer poses next to an event poster titled “Volunteers’ Frontline,” where she spoke from the stage about camouflage net weaving as a building block of national identity.

A pair of hands belonging to someone wearing a plaid shirt weaves strips of olive-green fabric into a net.

Because the Russian war has targeted civilians, and because most people who have picked up arms were not professional soldiers, weavers talk a lot about an existential threat they feel the war poses to the country. The city cemetery is aflush with blue and yellow flags decorating fresh graves. Yet hope is the prevailing mood. In fact, volunteers often correct one another when someone gives in to fear, explaining how crucial it is not to add any negativity to the camouflage. When I asked one of the volunteer elders how long he plans to make camouflage nets, he did not hesitate: “Till our victory.”

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On a hot day in late July, I walk up the chipped concrete stairway of a defunct maternity hospital. I try several screechy doors until one opens into a sunlit room with tiled green walls. Inside the small, stuffy room, I meet a group of volunteers creating handmade camouflage nets for the Ukrainian army.

A woman with chestnut hair notices me and invites me in, showing me to a coveted spot by the open window. I watch two women sitting behind a large frame with what looks like a fishing net stretched along its perimeter. They thread strips of fabric through each cell with quick, confident hand motions, leaning back to check their work. Behind them, a mountain of cardboard boxes overflows with fabric in demure colors. I register the clanking of scissors and the ripping of fabric to my right. Five older women cut the fabric into strips, sitting close together on the wooden chairs. Their unhurried conversation goes uninterrupted by my arrival.

The volunteers featured in this photo essay are not unique. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, when the Ukrainian government called for general mobilization in the war effort, over 600,000 civilians have turned into fighters. [1] [1] This number is an estimate based on comparing a recent interview with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with pre-war statistics. Official information regarding the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not often made public due to ongoing military operations. The majority of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are men, but women make up more than 7 percent of the force. Others, like the people featured in this essay, have helped the war effort in other ways, such as cooking meals to be shipped to the frontlines and crowdsourcing REB systems (anti-drone equipment).

As an anthropologist who grew up in Ukraine and now researches care work, I became interested in these makeshift volunteer efforts. When a childhood friend of mine told me she had started weaving camouflage nets used by civilians-turned-fighters, I wanted to learn more. I started interviewing weavers from afar, then learned how to weave camouflage in person during my summer breaks in Ukraine in 2023 and 2024. Since then, I’ve stayed in touch and collaborated with the volunteers on articles and community events in an effort to share with wider audiences a glimpse into civilian lives in wartime Ukraine.

Many communities across Ukraine remain caught in the existential threat of war, living under “constant attacks by guided bombs, missiles, and drones.” According to a report by the United Nations in August 2025, at least 13,883 Ukrainian civilians, including 726 children, have been killed, and 35,548 people have been injured, including 2,234 children. Recent reporting suggests 60,000–100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, with a total of 400,000 casualties (including both killed and wounded). The population has shrunk by an estimated 8 million since January 2022, as many have fled the country. Russian forces have violated international law and committed war crimes, including targeting civilians.

As they weave, volunteers are simultaneously unraveling Ukraine’s colonial past and building community.

Across Ukraine, communities gather daily to weave on site or coordinate weaving by dispersed volunteers. Many of them are women, but men weave as well. Volunteers are often retirees, stay-at-home parents, internally displaced people who may have lost their jobs, college students on break, or private business owners with flexible schedules. Others make camouflage weaving their second job.

Volunteers endlessly fundraise to procure the necessary materials. The resulting nets vary by color, material, density, and design—all to ensure effective seasonal camouflage effect. Making the nets is time-consuming, yet nets are generally a single-use item: They get burnt, torn up, left behind, or ruined by moisture and mud. Volunteers do not concern themselves with the nets’ longevity, however. Instead, they work tirelessly to weave care into this handmade ephemeral armor.

Often, they work even under cover of darkness. Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s power grid since the start of the war, compromising nearly two-thirds of its generative capacity and causing regular power outages. When lights are out, volunteers mount their headlamps and flashlights and continue weaving.

According to a senior volunteer/record-keeper, the community I work with wove 101,200 square meters of camouflage between February 2022 and January 2025. This translates to 3,480 nets, 1,717 uniform covers, and 379 helmet covers. Many soldiers rely on this labor of strangers; the waiting lists to receive camouflage are long, and volunteers’ social media posts routinely implore, “More hands are needed!” Some have organized their neighbors, colleagues, students, and other local youth to weave camouflage or help with related tasks.

A leafy, green tree stands in a courtyard covered in low green foliage. Barely visible in front of the tree stands a human figure clad from head to toe in a shaggy green camouflage suit.

While the nets cannot guarantee soldiers’ safety, they can assure a connection between the camouflage weavers and its wearers. Soldiers who rely on these gifts of handmade camouflage nets reciprocate by sending back an occasional note or a war souvenir to volunteers, like the remnant of an enemy soldier’s gear. Sometimes these souvenirs are repurposed into an attractive decoration or a household item, like a coffee mug, and auctioned by volunteers, who put the funds back into the gift cycle.

Such human reliance on gift exchanges to build social bonds has been richly documented by anthropologists. Although market exchanges have displaced gift-giving in many areas of social life, gifts still proliferate in areas that resist commoditization, such as in foreign diplomacy, in kin-making, and, it turns out, in war. According to the volunteers I spoke with, near-miss stories of soldiers going unnoticed by Russian forces at a critical moment are the ultimate reward for their labor of care.

As they weave, volunteers are simultaneously unraveling Ukraine’s colonial past and building community. Their conversation ebbs and flows with the movement of their hands. Some weavers enjoy analyzing previous Russian invasions described in Ukrainian poetry and prose, recounting historical events in Ukraine’s long fight for independence, or discussing geopolitics and current news. Others spend their time correcting one another’s surzhik (Russified grammar)—part of a broader effort to decolonize the Ukrainian language. Being in a room of weavers often reminded me of a classroom—and no wonder, since some of the participants are retired or current teachers.

Through weaving and talking, volunteers turn fibers into ties that bind. The camouflage they create may just save someone’s life—while refashioning Ukraine into a freer nation despite all odds.

Maryna Nading

Maryna Nading is a professor of anthropology at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Her research focuses on health, the workforce, and gender. She has written on issues of gender segregation by medical specialty, professionalization, remuneration, and class in Ukraine. Her work has appeared in Medical Anthropology Theory, Human Organization, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Anthropology of Work. Nading’s research investigates sites of care that extend beyond clinical settings. She is working with several Ukrainian volunteer groups who create camouflage nets for the army. Nading argues that such war relief efforts can be understood as a type of care and decolonization that fosters radical hope in the face of adversity.

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