In February, the Kiev office of security goods company A World of Armored Doors served as a showroom for every kind of armored door imaginable: some decorated with baroque painting, others with shatterproof glass windows, and a few with enough steel plates to weather a minor explosion.
But over the past seven months, the showroom has gone into war mode. Instead of armored doors, the company now churns out flak jackets for the Ukrainian army as it fights a prolonged battle against Russian-backed separatists. Stacks of armored plates line the walls of the basement office; vest patterns hang on models of reinforced doors. Mannequins decked out in flak vests and sunglasses greet visitors near the store’s entrance.
The store’s director, Igor Omelchenko, wearing green and brown camouflage, points to an informational video playing on a large-screen TV behind the mannequins. “Look, that’s how we test them,” he says enthusiastically as a man in camouflage on the screen takes aim at a metal plate with a semiautomatic rifle. Omelchenko then picks up a nearby plate and points out a small dent in the surface. A Ukrainian soldier brought it back from the front, he says. “The metal plate saved the soldier’s life. He just coughed a little on impact and was completely fine. We get a lot of stories like that.”
After fighting broke out in Kiev’s Maidan Square during antigovernment protests in February, the laws of supply and demand took over, and Omelchenko started getting phone calls from desperate people asking for flak jackets. “Sometimes the woman would be in tears of frustration,” he says. “And they’d say, ‘You can make armored doors, but you can’t make armored vests, what good is that?’”
Omelchenko started reaching out to his security contacts and found a reliable company that makes metal plates for flak vests. His team tested them out and eventually joined with a Ukrainian sewing company to make the vest’s fabric casing. By this spring, A World of Armored Doors became a showroom and an assembly area for bulletproof vests.
Omelchenko says he sells 2,000 to 3,000 Class 4 flak jackets every month, at $350 each. Class 4 jackets have plates made of Kevlar and steel. He also sells more sophisticated Class 6 models, which include metal breastplates, side plates in the kidney area, a neck guard, and a groin guard. Those sell for as much as $800. Omelchenko says he moves about 300 Class 6 vests each month.
A World of Armored Doors is one of four or five large flak jacket retailers in Ukraine. “I’d say that about 20 percent of the vests that we see on TV, they’re ours,” Omelchenko says.
Because of the long-term financial neglect of the Ukrainian army following the country’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, its military has had to rush to update or purchase new gear. New recruits, along with new members of Ukraine’s recently formed parliamentary battalions, have had to gear up, sometimes from scratch and often on their own dime.
The wait for a new jacket can sometimes take as long as a month, says Omelchenko. Mindful of the urgency some soldiers face, A World of Armored Doors now houses stacks of metal plates and fabric casing. The company also limits civilian buyers to two jackets at a time.
Sometimes, parents from villages will scrape together enough money to buy their newly enlisted son a flak jacket—no small feat, considering the least expensive jacket starts at $350, roughly equivalent to two months’ wages for the average Ukrainian. Other times, volunteer organizations will collect money to purchase the jackets for different battalions.
Next on Omelchenko’s agenda are Kevlar helmets for combat zones. There are practically none available in Ukraine, he says, adding that it will be at least a couple of months until they’re ready. By then, he’s not sure how much demand there will be, depending on how long the recently signed cease-fire lasts. Still, Omelchenko says it will be worth the risk. “It’s easier to prevent a fire than put it out.”
Jacobsen is a contributor for Bloomberg Businessweek in Kiev.
