🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage hide the entrance. One sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus cabinets full of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

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

Welcome to the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. The facility began operations in August and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters below the earth. It’s the most secure method of providing help to our injured military personnel. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats thirty to forty patients a each day. Their conditions vary. Some have catastrophic limb trauma necessitating amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop grenades with deadly precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter few gunshot wounds. It’s an era of drones and a new type of conflict,” the doctor said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the underground facility for treating injured soldiers in the eastern region.

On one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “Conflict is horrific. My comrade beside me, Vasyl, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Then the enemy forces dropped a second grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is destroyed. We see UAVs all around and casualties. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his squad spent 43 days in a wooded zone 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: food and water. A week following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), taking several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his physical condition. Following care, a nurse gave him new non-military attire: a shirt and a set of pale jeans.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a FPV drone caused a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been killed. There are continuous explosions.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to fight shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, took off a stained bandage and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A piece of mortar struck me. The cause was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a few months. After that, to go back to my military group. Our forces must protect our nation,” he affirmed.

Doctors care for the wounded soldier, who was hit in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly attacked hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. Per international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been killed in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, soil and granular material laid on top reaching ground level. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by drone.

A major industrial group, which funded the building, plans to build 20 facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically essential for saving the survival of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The organization referred to the project as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said certain wounded personnel had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated because of the danger of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who arrived at the early hours. I had to carry out a double amputation on a patient. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no other option.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. One must focus,” he said.

Medical assistants transported Mykolaichuk through the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's ginger cat, the mascot, padded toward the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”