🔗 Share this article

Sparse foliage conceal the entryway. One sloping wooden tunnel descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of extra garments. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians monitor a display. It shows the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean medical center look at a screen displaying enemy kamikaze and surveillance drones in the region.

This is Ukraine’s covert below-ground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the city of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters below the ground. It’s the most secure way of providing help to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of Russian first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which release grenades with lethal accuracy. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see few gunshot wounds. This is an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the underground installation for treating injured troops in the eastern region.

On one day recently, three soldiers limped into the facility. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had torn a small hole in his leg. “Conflict is horrific. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was killed,” he said. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

The soldier explained his unit spent 43 days in a wooded zone near the city, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their location was on foot. All supplies came by drone: rations and drinking water. A week following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse provided him with fresh non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, said a FPV drone ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a drone blast had left him with concussion. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been killed. We face continuous explosions.” A builder working in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as doctors laid him on a medical cot, took off a bloody dressing and treated his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to ring his family member. “A fragment of mortar struck me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a few months. After that, to go back to my unit. Our forces must protect our country,” he said.

Doctors treat the wounded soldier, who was hit in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in almost 2,000 assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and sand laid on top up to the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even multiple 8kg TNT charges dropped by drone.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the building, intends to erect 20 facilities in all. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- defence minister, the official, declared they would be “critically important for saving the survival of our military and assisting troops on the frontline.” The company described the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said some wounded personnel had to endure delays hours or even days before they could be evacuated because of the danger of aerial attacks. “Our facility received a pair of critically ill casualties who came at the early hours. I had to perform a double amputation on one of them. His bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no other option.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “I’ve been healthcare for two decades. One must concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier up the passage and into an ambulance. The transport was parked under a shrub. The patient and the two other military members were taken to the city of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, padded up to the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are open around the clock,” the surgeon said. “The work is continuous.”