🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees conceal the entrance. One sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a well-illuminated reception area. There is a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, cardiac monitors and ventilators. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical personnel at an underground medical center observe a monitor displaying enemy suicide and surveillance drones in the region.

This is Ukraine’s covert underground medical facility. The facility opened in August and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters under the ground. This is the safest way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats thirty to forty casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic leg injuries requiring amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Others can walk. Almost all are the casualties of Russian FPV drones, which release explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the doctor explained.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground installation for caring for injured soldiers in the eastern region.

During one afternoon recently, three military members limped into the hospital. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “War is horrific. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see drones all around and casualties. Our side's and theirs.”

The soldier said his squad endured 43 days in a wooded zone near the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to get to their position was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: food and water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), taking three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, 28, said a first-person view drone ripped a small hole in his lower limb.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he said. “I believe I was fortunate to remain alive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing explosions.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been struck in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, removed a stained bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A piece of mortar struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces has to protect our nation,” he said.

Doctors care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly attacked hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. Per international monitors, 261 health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly 2,000 attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and sand placed above up to ground level. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple 8kg TNT charges released by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the building, intends to build twenty facilities in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s national security council and former defence minister, the official, said they would be “vitally important for saving the lives of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The company described the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken after Russia’s military offensive.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, explained certain wounded personnel had to wait many hours or even days before they could be evacuated because of the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who came at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe operations? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled the soldier up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the other soldiers were transferred to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean medical team took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, padded toward the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “It doesn’t stop.”