Around 200 lorries have transported up to 4,000 tonnes of netting to the front line from countries including the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Belgium and France since the summer of 2024, with one truck due to leave the UK this week.
As well as covering trenches and foxholes, recycled fishing nets are now forming protective tunnels on supply routes to shelter troops and vehicles, a tactic first used by Russian forces in the Battle of Bakhmut.
Truckloads of fishing nets are being sent from round Europe and recycled on the front line to protect troops and vehicles (Photo: Aid Ukraine UK)Katarzyna Bylok, founder of Aid Ukraine UK, an umbrella group of organisations, said the amount of nets needed for defence is “huge”.
“Since 2024, FPV [First-Person View] drones are absolutely destroying the front line and attacking and killing anything that moves – from elderly citizens on bicycles, to civilian cars, evac crews, ambulances and of course the military.
“There simply aren’t any and everyone is looking. Brigades are constantly looking for possible supply routes.”
Soldiers have used the netting to guard them in foxholes (Photo: Aid Ukraine UK)
One brigade they work with has lost 14 of its 15 evacuation vehicles to drone attacks in the past couple of months.
“There’s no point getting expensive vehicles because they just keep getting blown up,” she said.
A drone attack on a military car which killed three Ukrainian soldiers (Photo: Fifth Assault Brigade)
In 2024, a British group called Pickups for Peace transported five or six tonnes of netting from the Scottish fishing industry to protect electricity infrastructure in Lviv.
One photo showed the aftermath of a drone attack on a military car in the Donetsk Oblast front line which killed three of the four soldiers from the 5th Assault Brigade who were inside.
Dmytro, 29, a Ukrainian special forces soldier in Donbas, said troops are most vulnerable to drone attacks while driving to and from the front line on evacuations or supply runs.
A Russian missile dropped by a drone that has been caught in one of the nets (Photo: supplied)
“But to drive to position you are an easy target. We are trying to cover the road to the position with these nets. It’s the cheapest way.”
The number of lorries arriving with nets has increased from around one every couple of months last year to one a week this year.
The shift in the war towards more drones had seen firefights with the Russians become less frequent.
The nets are also being used to protect vehicles“But for now, more countries are empty with nets, because it is really popular on the front line,” he said.
Otto Jelsma, a former soldier from the Netherlands leading the hunt for fishing netting around Europe, estimates he has helped organised around 2,000 tonnes of nets from Holland and Denmark.
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His first truck from the UK is being loaded in the Devon area this week. “We want to empty all of Europe,” he said.
“Some can stop a Shaheed. The fishing nets from the normal fishing line that type they [the drones] don’t see. They fly in it, and they don’t explode,” he said.
“If you got a message from a boy that’s the same age as your son thanking you for giving a net to his dad who survived twice because of that net we delivered that hits hard.”
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