🔗 Share this article

Scrubby trees hide the entryway. A sloping timber passageway descends to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a surgery unit, equipped with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians monitor a screen. It shows the movements of Russian spy drones as they zigzag in the sky above.

Medical staff at an underground medical center look at a monitor displaying Russian suicide and surveillance UAVs in the area.

Welcome to Ukraine’s covert below-ground medical facility. The facility opened in August and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the urban area of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the ground. This is the most secure way of delivering care to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” said the facility's lead doctor, Major the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles 30-40 patients a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma requiring amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV drones, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We see few bullet injuries. This is an era of drones and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

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

During one day last week, three soldiers limped into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV explosion had ripped a small hole in his limb. “Conflict is horrific. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces dropped a second grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs everywhere and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

The soldier explained his unit endured 43 days in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to get to their position was by walking. All supplies came by quadcopter: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a FPV drone ripped a small hole in his lower limb.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had left him with a head injury. “I was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it went dark. I lost sensation anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was fortunate to remain alive. A relative has been killed. There are continuous explosions.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had returned to Ukraine and volunteered to serve days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, took off a stained dressing and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a cellphone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces has to protect our nation,” he affirmed.

Medical staff care for the wounded soldier, who was hit in the back by a piece of mortar.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently attacked hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. Per international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from four steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and sand placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm projectiles and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices released by drone.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to build twenty facilities in total. The head of the nation's national security council and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally important for preserving the lives of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The company referred to the initiative as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had undertaken since Russia’s invasion.

An example of the centre’s operating theatres.

The surgeon, explained some injured soldiers had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated due to the danger of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of critically ill casualties who came at 3am. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the other soldiers were taken to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” the surgeon said. “The work is continuous.”