🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage hide the entrance. A sloping wooden passageway leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles 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 surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical staff at an subterranean hospital look at a monitor displaying enemy suicide and surveillance drones in the region.

This is the nation's secret below-ground hospital. This center began operations in August and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the earth. It’s the most secure way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” stated the facility's surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles thirty to forty patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which release grenades with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We see minimal bullet injuries. This is an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for treating wounded troops in the eastern region.

During one day last week, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is horrific. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Subsequently the enemy forces dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier explained his unit endured 43 days in a forest area near the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture for many months. Sole access to reach their position was by walking. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: rations and drinking water. A week after he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his vital signs. Following care, a medical attendant gave him fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored jeans.

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

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been killed. We face ongoing explosions.” A builder working in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a medical cot, took off a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to call his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces must protect our nation,” he said.

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

Over the past years, Russia has consistently attacked medical centers, health facilities, obstetric units and ambulances. Per international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly 2,000 attacks. The underground facility is built from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even three 8kg TNT charges released by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the building, plans to erect twenty facilities in total. A senior official of the nation's national security council and former military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally important for preserving the lives of our military and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The organization referred to the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken after Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said certain injured soldiers had to endure delays hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of critically ill patients who came at 3am. I had to perform a double amputation on one of them. His tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “I’ve been healthcare for two decades. One must focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was parked beneath a bush. The patient and the other military members were transferred to the city of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean medical team took a break. The facility's ginger cat, the mascot, padded toward the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” Holovashchenko stated. “It doesn’t stop.”