This originally appeared in print for The Ukrainian Weekly (11/10/23)
BROOKLYN, N.Y. – On any given Saturday in southern Brooklyn, N.Y., Chuk and a rotating group of volunteers gather in his backyard, or his basement, depending on the weather, to handmake ghillie suits meant to camouflage the snipers risking their lives across Ukraine’s vast frontline.
Volunteers – friends, neighbors and immigrants from the former Soviet Union, as young as seven and as old as 75 – arrive midmorning, working through the late afternoon, shredding burlap, stitching and gluing fabric, snacking, drinking, all the while mostly speaking to one another in their lingua franca – Russian.
Chuk knows how important these suits are. He served with the U.S. military as a sniper both in Iraq and later in Afghanistan. During his first tour, he had to learn to make basic suits and adapt them to their environments.
Chuk – which is not his real name but his former call sign – is a tall, broad man in his early 40s who immigrated with his parents from Ukraine to the United States a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 (He asked that his real name not be used in order to protect his safety).
By the time the volunteers arrive, Chuk has much of the materials needed to make the suits already laid out in his makeshift workshop. This includes corduro, cargo nets, lace, burlap and a variety of materials used for padding.
All of it is bought by Chuk and the volunteers, though some is donated or bought from the proceeds of donations.
Volunteers often stay late into the afternoon and sometimes well into the night. Though many come on Saturdays, several drop by on weekday evenings. A few even take materials back home and work on them in their spare time. Chuk has estimated that, since the war started, roughly 100 people have turned up at his house looking to help.
Volunteers are careful to make the money and materials stretch. While they have fun making the suits, many are there because they personally know someone fighting, or have already lost someone to the war, which for Ukrainians began long before Russia launched its invasion on February 24, 2022.
The volunteers maintain a variety of links to other organizations, grassroots groups and even just determined individuals based in the U.S. or Ukraine helping the war effort in some way. These include more local efforts such as Brooklyn-based, family-owned dress alteration shops that help stitch together the suits, and even hats; or further afield, in Kharkiv, the site of one of the most relentless Russian bombing campaigns, where a friend and her daughter have handmade hundreds of suits.
They’ve also received help from recently arrived Ukrainian refugees. A couple who survived and eventually escaped the monthslong siege of Mariupol, which saw the almost complete destruction of the city, came to Chuk’s house to join in the suit making.
Through the extensive volunteer group, they receive crucial, real-time information from friends and family across Ukraine that the volunteers can use to calibrate and coordinate their efforts, and ensure they’re providing those on the frontlines with exactly what they need.
Chuk explains that, when Russia first invaded the Donbas in 2014, later annexing Crimea, he began making simple versions of the suits he currently makes. He had by that time given away his military clothing, so he went on a road trip around America, gathering surplus gear from veterans he knew, out of which he would piece together suits.
“I would drive around the country to visit my old army friends and ask if they had any old boots, t-shirts, shoelaces, whatever,” he said.
Though the suits were simple, they were much needed as the Ukrainian army in 2014 was far less equipped than it is even today. Once he’d made the suits, he’d pack them in a duffel bag with other gear and pass them along to a friend or acquaintance who happened to be traveling to Ukraine and arrange for it to be passed along to soldiers.
Later, inevitably, the war would cool to a low-intensity, frozen conflict, and, eventually, Chuk stopped making the suits.
It wasn’t until almost seven years later, the day after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, that Chuk was walking around a hardware store, trying to figure out what equipment and supplies he could send to Ukraine when he noticed some tent tarp – the same material he used in his ghillie suits.
He was at the time exhausted from battling a life-threatening illness but he knew he needed to do something helpful rather than sitting at home on his phone scrolling the news and, in his own words, “feeling sorry for myself.”
He knew people who just exclusively made helmets, and others who exclusively made military boots, so he decided that he would be able to help more if he devoted his time to making just one item and making it well. Within days, he had assembled a crew of volunteers and began making the suits.
Soon, he found energy and purpose in devoting himself – at times day and night – to making the suits and finding more and more people to help. Though fully recovered from his illness, he thought of the whole endeavor at the time, he said with casual grim humor, as a “last hurrah.”
* * *
Sniper suits, or ghillie suits as they are known, have been in use since at least the early 20th century. Many classic ghillie suits, however, aren’t functional enough to meet the needs of modern warfare – especially not the kind of warfare seen in Ukraine, where enemy drones silently survey the battlefield for movement and opportunities to exploit.
The classic suits, still used by many in the Ukrainian army, are often heavy, can take two people to put one on or remove, and can quickly overheat, becoming all but useless to the snipers who have to spend hours in them.
When he began making his suits again in 2022, Chuk took these considerations – as well as what he knew about the conditions and terrain in which the Ukrainian army was fighting – and decided it needed to offer not only camouflage, but also the ability, if needed, to move freely or even run, and provide enough ventilation so as not to heat up to the point that heat-seeking drones could sense an individual wearing the suit. He pointed out that thermal imaging – used to spot the heat a body gives off – is a nightmare for snipers.
Once the enemy drone operator notices, they alert their teams and artillery fire can be adjusted and directed toward their position. They can even send a small, silent drone to drop a grenade on them.
“We added a lot of ventilation to decrease the heat signature. That’s our biggest challenge,” he said.
Chuk has made frequent trips to the frontline since February 2022, where he has met with soldiers and brigade leaders who tell him what they’re lacking, and what they need.
When he’s back in the U.S., he stays in touch with the soldiers on the frontline via Telegram, through which they send him pictures of the suits in action. He shows the photos to a correspondent, but also says he is not much interested in them.
It is feedback, not pictures from the soldiers, he said, that will help him improve the suits and, ultimately, save the lives of soldiers.
“I need negative feedback,” he said.
The focus, he said, was not to create a suit that is perfect for every environment, but to create “a base upon which a soldier can adapt to the environment in which they’ll be operating. The concept of our ghillie suit was, ‘we’ll give you the basic needs required for every environment, and it’s your option now to adapt it to the environment you’re working in.’”
Once the soldiers receive the suits, they’re encouraged to give them a “ghillie wash” – to get the suit thoroughly dirty either by hand or by wearing it – to ensure that the fabric’s shine has completely faded. Once it has undergone a ghillie wash, it can then be adapted to the environment in which it will be worn.
“Instead of us improvising or focusing on one type of production and sticking to it regardless, I realized we were cheating the guys out of quality. We can send them stuff and pat ourselves on the shoulders and say we’re doing a great job, but it won’t really be true. I was trying to avoid that. … We chose the difficult path – always change, always adapt,” he said.
There’s nothing better, he said over a beer in his backyard, than hearing that a soldier wearing one of his suits was able to complete a mission and successfully return to safety.
They’re now on version 10 of the suit, which Chuk believes to be a significantly improved version. Listening to the enthusiasm and authority with which he speaks about the suits and the scope for their improvement, one gets the impression that the 10th iteration won’t be the last.
* * *
Chuk is keen to stress that the work is a group effort. The suits, which weigh about six pounds, can take anywhere from 24-32 hours to make when working alone. With multiple people working together – shredding burlap, sewing, gluing, combining the component parts – several suits can be finished in a day. To date, they have made and shipped a little over 1,000 suits to Ukraine.
When a correspondent first visited Chuk’s house, shortly after the war started, he helped to roughly glue a few pieces of material to the suits. More recently, they have tried to use less glue and incorporate stitching and sewing into the process. When the same correspondent visited recently, two women were deftly working the top half of the suits through sewing machines.
Once made, the biggest hurdle with the suits is getting them to Ukraine. Initially, they had relied on friends and acquaintances traveling to the region to bring over duffel bags or suitcases, which would be transported by fixers from the Polish border to the frontlines. They soon after began sending larger volumes by FedEx and cargo planes, which would take roughly two weeks to arrive in Ukraine. Those efforts cost a lot of money.
To solve the shipping issue, Chuk realized he could have the suits made in Ukraine, and he struck a deal with a factory to start producing the suits next year. The company, which currently produces clothes and textiles, will start producing the suits according to the template and process that Chuk has developed.
He simply cannot produce enough suits to meet the number of orders he is receiving from his contacts on the front line. He’s also hopeful that the factory can create even a few jobs for some locals and the battered economy. Plus, he points out, there is no indication that a decisive outcome for the war is on the immediate horizon.
* * *
Chuk and his volunteers did not set out to make any money from the suits, and they have not. In fact, although many people donate money, both he and many of his volunteers have put considerable, for some even life-changing, sums of their own money toward making the suits and shipping them to Ukraine.
Though he and the volunteers will continue to handmake suits in Brooklyn, scaling up production in Ukraine will generate some revenue. But Chuk has already decided what to do with that money. It’s going to partially pay for his next endeavor to help Ukrainian soldiers: sniper training schools.
While Chuk is keen to stress that he is not a sniper instructor, and hasn’t been a sniper in close to 15 years, he does have several years’ of frontline experience, and he wants to share aspects of his training and accrued experience.
Right now, resources are short in Ukaine, and to his knowledge Ukraine doesn’t have enough rigorous sniper training programs. In many cases, Ukraine is already reliant on sending some of its soldiers abroad for specialized training. The idea behind these new sniper training schools was to take in novice or experienced soldiers and equip them not only with basic sniping skills, but with other related skills.
The sniper training schools are 14 days of intensive training, designed to push trainees to their limits. While sniper training is often pass or fail in the military, Chuk realized that Ukrainians being sent to the frontline don’t have the luxury of not learning these skills.
Marksmanship is only one component of the training. Trainees will also be pushed beyond their physical and mental limits and learn how much they can endure.
“How many hours of sleep do you need to perform your duties? How much water do you need to survive? Can I survive on 1,000 calories a day or fewer?” he said.
Shooting, he explains, is only 10 percent of a sniper’s job. The rest consists of, among other things, the ability to study maps and gather environmental information, or the underappreciated ability of staying cool, being patient and controlling one’s heart rate and breathing. The job requires long hours being spent alone not moving, so while they’re not required to be bodybuilders, they need to be in shape and know how to properly stretch.
Not only will trainees practice adapting their suits for their environments, but they will spend hours lying in wait while drones fly overhead trying to spot them. Chuk also thinks it’s important that all trainees know how to operate the drones, so he is employing a professional drone operator to train the soldiers.
“Flying drones is easy, but learning how to load that live ammunition without dropping it requires steady hands,” he said.
All of this requires instruction.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted a variety of test cases for both civilian and military drones. The army, and indeed those who produce drones, are watching in real time the efficacy of the many types being used both across the front lines as well as deep in the rear – a tactic more and more favored by Ukraine. By getting a basic working knowledge of the various types of drones, trainees can learn more about their uses and limitations and, hopefully, how to avoid being spotted by one.
Upon leaving Chuk, a correspondent saw he was gathering more materials and talking to two women working on sewing machines. Two other women – both of them born in Ukraine – were meditatively shredding burlap and cutting and adding lace to the suits to ensure that soldiers, who were just weeks away from putting the suits on, would have ample length to tie whatever stalks of grass and shrubbery they could pull from the Ukrainian soil and place onto their suits.
It was only midday when a correspondent left, but with the help of four volunteers who had come to do the quiet, necessary work despite the heavy morning rain, several new suits were already beginning to take shape.
Readers who would like to learn more or donate may visit: chuksuits.com.