Print for Victory
Two Kharkiv brothers devote their time to 3D-printing everything from dummy training grenades to comfortable handles for AK-47s, and provide them free to the army.
Georgii and Illia of 3Druk are the quintessential Ukrainian volunteers (tech edition): nerdy, dedicated, pragmatic, highly effective and skint. Illia is based out of his living room, while Georgii has the luxury of a workshop, in a former hotel that was converted into communal flats during the Soviet period. There’s no heating and the windows have been boarded up after a missile strike.
Illia picked up myself and Sashko in his ancient Soviet Zhiguli – Georgii’s car was crushed in the missile strike: ‘They’ll destroy anything,’ he commented with a shrug – and took us to the workshop, which hums with the chatter of multiple 3D printers.
The brothers are open about their identity, and have a public catalogue on Instagram for the army to browse.
Tell me about the items you make.
Illia: We have a very large range at the moment. We make drone detectors, FPV drones, handles for guns, target illuminators. Often soldiers come to us bringing some kind of device and we don’t even know what it is, but they say they need us to design a case for it, or they want us to figure out how it works and recreate it. We do an awful lot, when you add it all up. On a small scale, we’re not a factory, but nevertheless.
Georgii: We make training mines, not just for the military, but DSNS [state emergency services], civilian rescuers and organisations that train people. Because areas around Kharkiv are, sadly, heavily mined, with mines of different types, and people don’t even know what they look like. These organisations use our training mines to show them what real mines look like and how to deal with them. The military use them for training too.
Illia: There are basic things that we constantly produce, that we’ve been making for a long time in large quantities. We’ve started making dropping mechanisms, which are quite complex. It’s system you can attach to [quadcopter] drones so they can carry things. Ammunition or even water. It can’t carry much, because the drones themselves are small. For example, when the dam was destroyed and part of Kherson was severely flooded, bottles of water were delivered to people this way.
We know a volunteer who saw a family receiving a bottle of water thrown by a drone on the news, and he was happier with that than he was with killing [Russian soldiers]. He said: that’s my dropper, look, the lads sent me a video, and it ended up on the news. He was glad in a simple, human way.
Do you consider yourselves specialists?
Illia: We’re self-taught. Four years ago, I had no interest in 3D printing. I just knew there was such a thing, and roughly how it works, but life forced me to get involved. I don’t know how to do modelling, for example. I’ve had to find out a little about electronics, remember how to do soldering welding […] I wouldn’t call myself a specialist, I just know how to do it. My current knowledge is enough to cover all the requests that come. Clearly we’re developing, if you’re constantly doing this you get new knowledge then use it.
How many printers do you have?
Georgii: I have four that are working right now. Illia has four and Yan has three.
Illia: There are a lot of people living in other cities who help us. I’m not sure how many printers they have in total.
Georgii: If you count all the printers being used by people who work with us, I think there’s about forty in total.
Do the printers work 24/7?
Georgii: Yes. So long as we have plastic. And electricity.
How many electricity blackouts are there at the moment in Kharkiv?
Georgii: Hardly any this year. Well, there have been some planned local switch-offs. Anyway we have backup batteries we can use for urgent orders. For example, I’ve got a scooter with a huge battery and in winter I use it as a powerbank for printing. Some army guys gave us some really big, strong batteries.
Illia: And you can plug a soldering iron into your phone, even. We adapt! Even if there’s no electricity, we don’t stop. If we can’t print, we solder.
Sometimes the printers must break down.
Georgii: [We have] a printer that had been printing for about 500 days. It broke down, and I’ve ordered parts for it. We repair everything ourselves, and if there are components that can’t be repaired, we just replace them. If you don’t know what’s broken, you buy a new one, and that’s it.
Illia: There are local shops in Kharkiv that sell spare parts made in China, and we buy there because it’s quick.
Georgii: But it depends on price. If possible, we buy a couple of examples and check them, and if they’re OK we order in bulk from China by AliExpress, Alibaba or Taobao. That’s cheaper.
Illia: There are some difficulties with delivery.
Georgii: AliExpress doesn’t deliver to Kharkiv. But we get things delivered to another town that’s further from the frontline and then on to us by post.
This video shows an FPV drone carrying a payload. The brothers designed and produced a custom mount to securely attach the payload to the drone during flight. From the 3Druk Telegram group.
Do you have enough printers now?
Georgii: Yes. We have as many as we have material for. We could have more, but then we’d run out of material in a week.
Illia: There are people who exclusively do printing, and they are probably always short of printers and have a lot of requests.
Georgii: But we have our hands full with soldering, assembling [special items] and so on. You mustn’t bite off more than you can chew.
Are you part of the international 3D-printing network for Ukraine?
Illia: We work in a more local way. Friends of people we know come to us. For example, Ihor also had friends who had bought a printer, and we gave them tasks to do. Of course there are international organisations like Druk Army, who are centralised, and have large groups, but we have a compact group, with about ten small workshops.
Do you get any help from the state?
Illia: To be honest we don’t ask them direct. There are so many duties, so many restrictions, on grant money that they hinder rather than help.
Georgii: Corruption can be an issue.
Illia: We just decided to distance ourselves. There are people who donate to us and offer support, us making things, and the fighters using them. It’s a closed circle and we aren’t interested in what’s going on around us. We don’t bother ourselves about the state.
A magazine-loading device in action, from the 3Druk Telegram group. Georgii: “The original idea comes from enemy equipment, but we created our own version, which works effectively and allows for quick magazine reloading. After this device, we went on to develop versions adapted for modern weapons.”
When did you start volunteering?
Illia: It was when we returned to Kharkiv three months after we’d left at the start of the full-scale invasion. We got involved with evacuating people’s belongings from dangerous areas of the city. That was our first volunteering activity, meaning that we didn’t take money for it, people just sometimes paid us for the petrol.
We started our current volunteering about six months after the full-scale invasion. I had a printer Georgii had given me earlier, and when we returned to Kharkiv to put things in order after a missile strike we saw on social media that people were printing things.
I had a stash of materials from my past life, so to speak, and I decided to use it all on useful things for the military. I started printing tails [for small bombs carried by drones]. When I ran out of my own materials, I bought more. But I needed a lot and I decided to ask my friends to buy material and I’d use it to print various things for the military. We have a lot of friends, and they supported the idea. I realised this was snowballing and one printer wasn’t much at all. So I taught Georgii and in autumn 2022, we offered our first big collection [of printed drone accessories].
Georgii: We decided to just ask everyone we know to club together to buy us a printer. It took us less than a day to collect enough money, order a printer and start working. Basically we continued the work Illia had been doing on his printer; we just scaled up and did twice as much. And then somehow things kept going. We realised that we were essentially limited only by the amount of space we had. Gradually we began to expand our work. We were exclusively doing printing at that point.
Illia: Then we got lucky. A friend told his colleagues, these guys are doing 3D printing, can we collect material for them. And so it gradually developed, as most of our friends are in IT and they, let’s say, have connections, and some quite large Ukrainian IT firms who were helping volunteers approached us. One sent us a large donation, and we were able to buy everything we needed. They told us that if we needed something we shouldn’t be shy, we should write to them and they’d buy it for us.
Thanks to that support, we managed to develop and attract more people. We met Yan [see interview below], when he came to give us material in person. Then he said, maybe I’ll buy a printer and do this myself. He bought one printer, then another, and bought material himself, and we taught him. Well, mostly he taught himself. Another guy, Ihor, didn’t donate, but offered practical help on a volunteer basis. He began to do soldering here.
Georgii: Ihor collected some dummy training mines and when we began to expand our range of activities, beyond just printing, into electronics, he began to help us more in that area.
It seems to me yours is a man’s world. Are there women?
Georgii: Yes, lots. My wife know how to do 3D printing. If I say we need to print whatever models, then take them off, wash them, she does it all herself. We also have women volunteers who do soldering and assemble drones.
Illia: There are fewer of them, though. I’d say it’s about ten per cent women.
Georgii: We have a group chat with the people we work with, and there are a lot of women. They take orders, print what’s needed.
Illia: Most of the financial donations we receive are from women.
Volunteer Tetiana soldiering training mines. From the 3Druk Telegram group.
The situation with drones is getting worse and worse at the front. How does this affect your work?
Georgii: This situation has forced us to refocus a little, direct our energies to the development of something new that can counter it. Right now there’s a guy in Kyiv, a member of our community, who is helping us to device an effective drone detector which allows you to simultaneously detect drones on several different frequencies. Because there’s the same problem all along the front line now. Everyone wants to know what’s flying at them.
We’re concentrating on producing things that help people to survive, that’s the only way to put it. All our work, all our resources are devoted to that aim. As soon as we come up with a device we will immediately add it to our range and give it out for free as usual. We can’t do much, but it’s better than nothing.
Illia: We don’t take, for example, bulk orders from the army like Druk Army do. There are people who print things well, and that’s great, but it’s all they do; we can do more. Sometimes we have to refuse an order, but that’s only so we can help with more useful things that not everyone can do.
How can readers help you?
Georgii: There are several international communities helping us. They used to take orders and print things themselves in Poland or wherever, and send them to the soldiers.
Illia: But it’s not always convenient because requests are often urgent – sometimes items are needed the next day and delivery takes time. Mostly what we need are spare parts and money. Some things can be bought more cheaply in Poland and sent there. We have PayPal, though I wouldn’t say we receive a lot of international support.
The boys’ PayPal is at donate@3dryk.pro. Please select Friends and Family, and add a note: ‘3D printing supplies’.
Georgii: A lot of people help through Sashko and Freefilmers. It’s mostly people who lived here [i.e. Ukrainian emigrants now based abroad].
The Zhiguli
This fine vehicle has a history of its own.
Illia never wanted to learn to drive, but this car belonged to his wife’s grandfather and wasn’t being used. His family gave him a certificate from a driving school so he felt morally obliged to learn how to actually do it.
Illia: “In our country, before the full-scale invasion, 90% of people bought their driving licence. I’m not lying. The system has changed now. You can’t buy a licence. […]
When the full-scale invasion happened, I’d only been driving this car for sixteen hours. I was inexperienced. My wife, my mother-in-law and my cat evacuated [with me] and since them I’m not afraid to drive, I’m not afraid of dangerous situations. I never wanted to drive, but now I drive around on volunteering business all day.
We came back three months into the full-scale war and began evacuating people and property from the areas of the city where there was constant shelling. We did it for free, for the price of the petrol. We evacuated people, though one guy asked us to evacuate his alcohol stash!
Yan
On our journey from the workshop to Illia’s flat, we stopped by the workshop of one of their fellow volunteers, Yan. I asked him about his own involvement in 3D printing.
Yan: I’ve been in IT all my life, and I’ve been helping the military and civilians since 2014. My whole family is involved.
We used to mostly help civilians who had left the occupied territory. After 2022 it changed…. During the first six months when there were very few people left in Kharkiv, there was a big problem with food supplies, especially for elderly people. I delivered from on a bicycle. Then I saw Illia on Facebook or Instagram maybe, I don’t remember, and he wrote that they were starting to print tails, the smallest things. I had some plastic left.
My daughter had died at the very start of the full-scale war. I had plastic left over from the 3D printing she’d done with her nephews. I called Ilya and said, I want this plastic to be used to avenge my daughter’s death. Then we began to talk more, and I bought some plastic.
We got one printer, then another, then a third from some lads. Then I found a a group that was teaching people how to make drones.
Do you mostly work alone, or with the brothers?
I mostly work alone. We stay in contact and share experiences, but mostly we work separately. I print and solder something, and send it off. Sometimes we combine and send things together, or I send things myself to soldiers I know.
Georgii uses a spot welder to assemble a 5S battery for a Mavic drone. Video from the 3Druk Telegram group.
These people are ***amazing***!!!