🔗 Share this article

Scrubby trees hide the entryway. One sloping wooden passageway leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital staff at an underground medical center look at a monitor showing enemy suicide and surveillance drones in the area.

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 close to the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the earth. It’s the most secure way of providing help to our injured military personnel. And it keeps healthcare workers protected,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly precision. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. This is an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground installation for caring for wounded soldiers in the eastern region.

During one day last week, three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an first-person view drone blast had torn a small hole in his leg. “War is terrible. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Subsequently the enemy forces released a another grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. We see UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his squad spent over a month in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to reach their location was on foot. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: food and water. A week after he was hurt, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), taking several hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant provided him with new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had resulted in concussion. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was fortunate to remain alive. A relative has been killed. There are ongoing detonations.” A construction worker employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to serve days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in early 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his family member. “A piece of mortar struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to return to my military group. Someone has to defend our country,” he affirmed.

Medical staff treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the dorsal area by a fragment of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently targeted hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost 2,000 attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top reaching the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even three 8kg explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which funded the building, plans to build twenty facilities in total. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and former military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically important for preserving the survival of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The company described the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, explained certain wounded personnel had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported because of the danger of aerial attacks. “We had two severely injured patients who came at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. The soldier's tourniquet had been applied for such an extended period there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “My career in healthcare for two decades. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked under a shrub. He and the other military members were taken to the urban center of a major city for additional medical care. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, walked toward the entrance to await the next arrivals. “We are active around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”