🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage conceal the entrance. One sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical staff at an subterranean medical center look at a screen displaying Russian suicide and surveillance drones in the region.

Welcome to the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, situated in the eastern part of the country close to the frontline and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the earth. This is the most secure way of providing help to our injured soldiers. It also ensures healthcare workers safe,” stated the clinic’s lead doctor, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 patients a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV drones, which drop grenades with lethal precision. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the doctor explained.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean facility for caring for injured troops in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon recently, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV blast had torn a minor wound in his limb. “War is horrific. My comrade next to me, Vasyl, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Then the enemy forces dropped a second grenade on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs all around and casualties. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his squad spent 43 days in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to get to their position was on foot. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: rations and water. A week following he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medic assessed his vital signs. Following care, a nurse gave him new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view drone ripped a small hole in his lower limb.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. My cousin has been lost. We face ongoing detonations.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had returned to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors placed him on a bed, took off a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a mobile phone to ring his sister. “A fragment of artillery struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a few months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Our forces has to protect our country,” he affirmed.

Medical staff care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, Russia has consistently targeted medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top reaching the surface. It can withstand impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even three 8kg TNT charges dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the building, intends to build twenty facilities in total. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and former military leader, the official, declared they would be “vitally essential for saving the lives of our military and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The organization described the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had undertaken since the enemy's invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said some wounded soldiers had to wait many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill patients who came at the early hours. I had to perform a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. One must concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled the soldier through the passage and into an ambulance. The transport was parked under a shrub. He and the other military members were transferred to the city of Dnipro for additional medical care. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked up to the doorway to await the next arrivals. “We are open 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “The work is continuous.”