🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage conceal the entrance. One sloping timber passageway leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and ventilators. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors monitor a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

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

This is the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. The facility began operations in August and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the earth. It’s the safest way of delivering care to our injured soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” stated the facility's surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles thirty to forty casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic leg injuries necessitating amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Others can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of Russian FPV drones, which drop explosives with deadly precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. It’s an era of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor explained.

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

On one day recently, three soldiers limped into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV blast had ripped a small hole in his leg. “War is horrific. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces released a another grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured 43 days in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to get to their location was on foot. All supplies arrived by quadcopter: food and water. Seven days following he was hurt, he walked 5km (about 3 miles), taking three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medical staff assessed his vital signs. Following care, a nurse gave him new non-military attire: a shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view drone caused a small hole in his leg.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been lost. There are ongoing detonations.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as doctors placed him on a bed, removed a bloody bandage and cleaned his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to call his family member. “A piece of mortar hit me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a several months. After that, to return to my unit. Our forces must defend our country,” he affirmed.

Doctors treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the back by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, soil and granular material placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even three 8kg TNT charges dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the construction, plans to erect 20 facilities in all. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- military leader, the official, declared they would be “vitally important for saving the lives of our military and assisting troops on the frontline.” The company referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said certain wounded personnel had to wait hours or even days before they could be transported due to the threat of aerial attacks. “We had two critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Medical assistants transported the soldier up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed beneath a bush. The patient and the two other military members were taken to the city of Dnipro for additional medical care. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, padded up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are open around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”