The Ukrainian frontline soldiers have begun wearing “invisibility cloaks” to prevent their thermal signature from being picked up by Russian soldiers, ABC News reported Monday.
The cloak has allowed Ukrainian soldiers “to block the body’s heat and keep it inside,” allowing them to evade detection, and has been domestically produced, Patrick Reevell claimed in a video uploaded by ABC..
Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines of the war against Russia’s invasion face threats from thermal cameras, which can detect them in cover. In response, they’re deploying domestically made “invisibility cloaks.”
ABC News’ @Reevellp reports. pic.twitter.com/8jMqqbVFFn
— ABC News (@ABC) January 29, 2024
The video appeared to show Maxim Boryak, the co-creator of the cloak, and Reevell showing off the cloak and its capabilities. “They call this an invisibility cloak. One of the threats Ukrainian soldiers face on the front line is that Russia has thermal imaging scanners that allow them to detect them in cover,” Reevell said in the video. Reevell claimed that the cloak allowed for Ukrainian soldiers “to remain completely concealed” from such scanners. (RELATED: VALERIEVICH: Military Budget Means Nothing If You’re Not Willing To Fight)
A thermal scanner used in the appeared to video to show the considerable difference between someone who wore the cloak versus someone who did not. “Now you see me. Now you don’t,” Reevell could be heard saying as its co-creator turned with the cloak on and as his heat signature faded.
“Does Ukraine have enough of these at the moment?” Reevell asked Boryak in the video.
“Of course not. There will never be enough anything in the war — in the army,” Boryak answered. Boryak said the cloaks were difficult and time consuming to produce. “One man can produce one cloak in two days if they work like full work day,” he said. Boryak estimated that there might be 40 or fewer cloaks in the entire army and that he was paying for the costs of production from his own pocket.
This technology was touted by Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov as a “super defense against Russian technology” in a Facebook post translated into English by the Ukrainian World Congress back in Oct. of 2023. HiderX, a Russian company, announced its own version of Ukraine’s cloak to hide its own soldiers from Ukrainian thermal imaging technology in Jan. 19, Newsweek reported, citing Tass, a Russian state news agency.