🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees hide the entrance. A descending wooden passageway leads down to a well-illuminated reception area. There is a surgery unit, equipped with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors keep an eye on a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

Hospital personnel at an underground medical center observe a screen showing enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the region.

This is the nation's covert underground hospital. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters below the ground. This is the most secure method of providing help to our injured soldiers. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” said the facility's lead doctor, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty patients a day. Cases differ widely. Some have devastating limb trauma requiring amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Others can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We encounter few gunshot wounds. This is an era of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon explained.

Maj the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for caring for injured troops in eastern Ukraine.

On one day recently, a group of three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone blast had torn a small hole in his leg. “Conflict is horrific. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was killed,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. We see UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit endured over a month in a wooded zone close to the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to reach their location was on foot. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: rations and water. A week following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medic assessed his vital signs. Following care, a medical attendant gave him new civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, 28, said a FPV drone caused a small hole in his lower limb.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a drone blast had resulted in a head injury. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I believe I was lucky to survive. A relative has been lost. We face continuous explosions.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to serve shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a bloody bandage and treated his recent injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A fragment of mortar hit me. It was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Someone has to protect our country,” he said.

Medical staff treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the back by a piece of mortar.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently targeted hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been killed in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and granular material placed above reaching ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices released by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the construction, intends to erect twenty units in all. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the lives of our military and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented after Russia’s military offensive.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, explained certain wounded soldiers had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who arrived at the early hours. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. 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. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed beneath a bush. The patient and the other military members were transferred to the city of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, padded up to the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” the surgeon said. “The work is continuous.”