In the early morning hours of Feb. 24, 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine. At the time, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it a “special military operation.” Now, nearly four-and-a-half years later, the war rages on. And it’s a new kind of warfare, where small armed drones supplement expensive missiles.
A new kind of warfare requires new defense strategies. And, it turns out, fishing nets are an effective tool against exploding drones.
Eric Klose, founder of the Boston-based impact-first investment group Ground Squirrel Ventures learned this on a visit to Ukraine last year. While there, he met with some humanitarian groups, and he posed a question:
“If I could fix one thing, what would you want it to be?”
The answer was simple, and surprising – nets.
Nets cover hundreds of miles of roadways near the front line. They are draped over trees to protect gathering places. They cover trenches, and bombed-out windows and doors.
Big trawling nets, seine nets, and even thin-filament gill nets play a role.
Klose said soldiers cut gill nets into strips and keep them in their packs to use for emergency cover. They seal up openings like bombed-out windows and doors on the front lines.
"So they can carry it on their person because it's lightweight and it keeps some of the – you know it's not going to keep a heavy ordnance away – but it's going to keep the minor stuff blocked off."
Klose learned about a Canadian nonprofit that has been shipping fishing nets to Ukraine and decided to try and replicate that effort in the U.S. He reached out to Net Your Problem, an Alaska-based net recycling organization with a warehouse in New Bedford. They had the nets, and Ground Squirrel Ventures Operations Manager Brian Shaw lined up the funding and figured out the logistics.
In December, they met up in New Bedford and loaded a shipping container with nets and rope that had recently worked the Massachusetts coastline.
“We sent our first container from New Bedford in December that had a variety of different kinds of nets in it," said Net Your Problem Founder and Executive Director Nicole Baker. "And then we basically had to wait for it to get there, which took a couple of months. And so once it got there, once the nets got distributed and they decided kind of like, you know, what nets they liked ... I used that information, then, to sort through a pile of nets that we had in Newport, Oregon. So I loaded up another container."
Ground Squirrel Ventures shepherded that container to Ukraine as well, and it arrived in Kyiv on Wednesday, July 15. A third shipment from Seattle will go out this month.
Baker said she has plenty of nets to ship, but they need to be prepped. All floats, chains and rubber need to be removed. And some mesh sizes are more useful than others.
Klose said they are adapting the shipments as information comes in from the front lines.
"The feedback loop of discovering what is most useful, as people are innovating and playing with the options in real time, is really neat," he said.
Local fishermen with nets to donate can contact Net Your Problem. Kolse says those donations make a real difference.
"You know, it lets everyday people be heroes," he said. "You can go save lives, like in a war, and it's your trash that you aren't sure what to do with anyway."
He said he hopes more people will be motivated to donate used nets to this cause, and then keep up the habit of donating nets to Net Your Problem for recycling and other types of reuse, even after the war is over. Fishing nets are made of plastic, and can be a major source of plastic pollution if left to deteriorate in the environment.
Baker said she’s pleased to see the old nets be put to use, even if she wishes it were under better circumstances.
"I wish we didn't have to do this," she said. "I wish we weren't in a war where this was necessary. But I guess, as long as it is going on, we are happy to contribute in this way.”
And, she said, there seems to be an insatiable need for nets in Ukraine.
