🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage hide the entryway. A descending timber tunnel descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a operating ward, equipped with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets full of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians keep an eye on a display. It shows the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they weave in the air above.

Medical staff at an subterranean medical center observe a monitor showing Russian suicide and surveillance drones in the area.

This is the nation's covert underground hospital. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located 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 most secure way of delivering care to our injured military personnel. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Maj the chief surgeon.

This medical station treats 30-40 casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries requiring amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Others can move on their own. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which release explosives with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We see few gunshot wounds. This is an age of unmanned aircraft and a new type of war,” the surgeon explained.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean installation for caring for wounded troops in eastern Ukraine.

During one afternoon recently, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an FPV explosion had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “War is terrible. My comrade next to me, Vasyl, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a second explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is demolished. We see UAVs everywhere and casualties. Our side's and the enemy's.”

The soldier explained his squad spent 43 days in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to get to their position was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: food and water. A week following he was injured, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his vital signs. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

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

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly went dark. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was lucky to remain alive. My cousin has been lost. We face continuous detonations.” A construction worker employed in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as doctors laid him on a medical cot, took off a stained bandage and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a cellphone to ring his family member. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Our forces has to defend our nation,” he affirmed.

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

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. Per international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and sand laid on top reaching ground level. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple 8kg explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the building, plans to erect 20 facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally essential for saving the survival of our military and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization described the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said some injured soldiers had to wait hours or even days before they could be evacuated due to the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured casualties who came at the early hours. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on a patient. His tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier through the passage and into an ambulance. The vehicle was parked under a shrub. The patient and the two other soldiers were transferred to the city of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, padded toward the doorway to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”