🔗 Share this article

Sparse foliage hide the entryway. One sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a brightly lit reception area. There is a surgery unit, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

Medical staff at an subterranean medical center look at a monitor showing Russian kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the area.

This is the nation's covert below-ground hospital. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “We are six meters below the earth. This is the safest method of providing help to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” said the facility's lead doctor, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy FPV aerial devices, which drop grenades with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see minimal bullet injuries. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the surgeon explained.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground installation for caring for wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one day last week, a group of three military members limped into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a small hole in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Then the Russians dropped a second grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is destroyed. We see drones everywhere and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier explained his squad endured over a month in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to reach their location was by walking. All supplies came by drone: rations and water. A week following he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his vital signs. Following care, a medical attendant provided him with new civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, stated a first-person view aerial device ripped a small hole in his leg.

Another patient, 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 couldn’t feel any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. My cousin has been killed. There are continuous explosions.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and volunteered to serve days before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors placed him on a medical cot, took off a bloody dressing and treated his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his family member. “A piece of mortar hit me. It was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a few months. After that, to return to my military group. Someone must defend our nation,” he said.

Doctors treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the back by a fragment of artillery shell.

Over the past years, Russia has consistently attacked hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand placed above up to the surface. It can withstand impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices released by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to erect 20 units in all. A senior official of the nation's national security council and former military leader, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The organization described the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken after the enemy's military offensive.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said certain wounded personnel had to endure delays hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated because of the threat of air assaults. “We had two critically ill casualties who came at the early hours. 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 alternative.” What is his method with traumatic surgeries? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed beneath a bush. He and the other military members were transferred to the urban center of a major city for additional medical care. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The facility's ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked toward the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are open 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”