Ukrainian artist Alena Grom made volunteers from Gorenka – and their village’s locally made camouflage netting – the focus of a recent photography exhibit in Kyiv.
Inside an abandoned building in the village of Gorenka, just northwest of Kyiv, a group of women has been busy helping Ukrainian soldiers become invisible.
Led by former salesclerk Alina Kriskevich, the volunteers weave camouflage netting, often working under the dim glow of flashlights or by candlelight when blackouts submerge the village in darkness. Their fingers move quickly, twisting and tying, knotting thin strips of cloth or jute – a coarse fibre – around handmade nets.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the all-women team who call themselves Gorenski Mavki – or the “Sirens of Gorenka” – have been crafting camouflage netting to conceal soldiers on the front lines. Taking their name from a temptress in Ukrainian folklore who lures foes and submerges them in darkened waters, the women are also engaged in reclaiming their heritage in the face of Russia’s attacks not only on Ukraine’s territory but also on its culture.
Mavka – or Mavki, plural – “is this murky figure in our Ukrainian mythology that hides in the water. The mavka lures and takes away bad people,” said Ms. Kriskevich, 37, in an interview over Telegram. “For us, the bad people are the Russians.”
The women’s handmade nets and the camouflage gear worn by troops – have saved lives by entangling drones in their intricate webs, concealing soldiers in trenches and shielding their weapons; they’ve helped soldiers overcome enemy troops and landed the women a reputation to match their name.
Ms. Kriskevich said that in the last two years, the group has delivered hundreds of pieces of camouflage gear to the front lines, collectively measuring more than 17,000 square metres and sent as far as Bakhmut, and most recently, Kursk.
The women – who range in age from their late 20s to 92 – set up shop in an unused space in the village. Each corner is crowded with bags filled with strips of green, brown and beige fabric.
The chalk-white walls are decorated in images of the mermaid-like silhouette of the Mavka, hand-painted and sent by people from all over Ukraine.
A figure between the worlds of the dead and the living, the Mavka appears in Ukrainian mythology, fairytales and art, explains Alena Grom, a Ukrainian artist and refugee from Donetsk who made the Mavki of Gorenka the focus of a recent photography exhibit in Kyiv. “The Mavka is a national Ukrainian figure,” she said in a Zoom interview from the capital. “A nation, during difficult times, often looks for comfort in its roots and its heritage.”
What struck Ms. Grom about the women in Gorenka was how much the community-style process of crafting camouflage gear resembled the age-old custom of stitching Ukrainian embroidery, also a communal activity for women. “It’s just like in the past – you come, 20 women are sitting, someone is weaving, someone is singing,” she said. “Making camouflage is our modern-day national craft.”
Ms. Kriskevich said the community they’ve built has also been crucial to reclaiming a sense of normalcy. “We celebrate gender reveal parties, birthdays, we chat – we’re here all the time,” she said.
But more than anything, she added, the group has given the women a place to channel their grief.
In the early morning hours of Feb. 24, 2022, Ms. Kriskevich and her husband were sleeping in their house in Gorenka when they were awoken by the sound of explosions. “You hear a crash somewhere above in the sky. You know something’s been hit, but you don’t know what. Then all you hear is the scraping of metal,” she said.
The village of about 7,000 soon found itself on the front lines of Russia’s invasion, with constant shelling and bombardment. Surrounded by rivers and ponds, the earth in Gorenka is too damp for basements and underground shelters that would allow villagers to hide, said Ms. Kriskevich, who briefly evacuated to Kyiv with her husband and mother-in-law.
They returned to a hometown that was more than 70 per cent destroyed. On a community Telegram channel, the women of the village started to discuss what they could do to help the troops defending the region while recognizing that they had little to give. That’s when they discovered that soldiers were in desperate need of camouflage.
“In the beginning, we started using anything we could find – sheets, robes, rags,” Ms. Kriskevich said. They cut tiny strips of fabric before dipping them into paint and hot water. “Our palms were completely black by the end of the night from the paint.”
When the women sent off their first set of nets, they were proud. But the feeling faded when they got a message from the troops receiving their package.
”They said, ‘What do you want us to do with these? Would you like us to throw them out or send them back to you?’ ”
It turned out that while the women had made sure the gear blended seamlessly with the landscape, it was incredibly heavy and unusable. “We were devastated,” Ms. Kriskevich said.
Over time, however, the women refined their technique. “The guys would tell us, ‘Ladies you saved lives!’ We got goosebumps all over,” said Ms. Kriskevich, who now gets requests from military units across Ukraine through Instagram, TikTok and Telegram.
Their process has remained more or less the same: A handful of women work around the clock while dozens of part-time helpers come and go. They chat, they sing, they gossip, they make TikTok videos, and often, they sit in silence – a stillness they’ve grown to appreciate.
“You sit there and it’s sort of a meditation,” Ms. Kriskevich said.
While the task is time-consuming, it’s not difficult, said Iryna Maslikova, one of the volunteers. What’s difficult is when a package bounces back.
A number of times, the women would be in touch with a soldier to co-ordinate a delivery, only to see that the package was not picked up for days.
“We would go on social media and see that a wife or girlfriend posted that they had died,” Ms. Kriskevich said.
Ms. Grom, the artist, sees the work of the Mavki as serving two purposes: protecting the soldiers on the front lines and building a national identity, separate from Russia’s long-held influence.
The intentional destruction of Ukrainian art, literature and other cultural artifacts by Russian troops, as well as the killing of prominent artists and writers, such as Volodymyr Vakulenko and Victoria Amelina, have been well-documented.
Ms. Grom sees the camouflage nets as representing the country’s new shared reality. “The women are all weaving and adding to this one big net, and this net is to protect all of us.”
In Russia, a website displaying Ms. Grom’s photos was recently blocked. “They are afraid of the images because I tell the story, not through propaganda, but through photographs so that anyone – in India, in America – anyone in the world can understand,” she said.
“The Russians were aiming at the memory of the Ukrainians,” wrote Ms. Grom in a foreword to one of her projects. “Memory is not material, it cannot be destroyed.”
