🔗 Share this article

Scrubby trees hide the entryway. A sloping timber passageway leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a operating ward, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the movements of Russian spy drones as they weave in the air above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean medical center look at a monitor displaying enemy kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret below-ground medical facility. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are six meters under the earth. This is the safest way of providing help to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats thirty to forty patients a day. Cases differ widely. Some have devastating limb trauma requiring amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release explosives with lethal precision. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see minimal bullet injuries. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor said.

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

During one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an FPV explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is horrific. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a second grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. There are drones everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad spent 43 days in a wooded zone close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to get to their position was on foot. Necessary provisions came by drone: rations and drinking water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him fresh non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view drone ripped a minor injury in his leg.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a drone blast had left him with a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been lost. There are continuous explosions.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to his homeland and volunteered to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff placed him on a bed, removed a stained bandage and cleaned his recent injury from fragments. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his sister. “A piece of mortar struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Someone has to defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Doctors treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the dorsal area by a piece of artillery shell.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, 261 health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and granular material laid on top up to the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges released by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to erect 20 facilities in total. The head of the nation's national security council and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally important for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented since the enemy's invasion.

An example of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, explained certain wounded personnel had to wait many hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated due to the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured patients who arrived at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. His tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe operations? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. One must concentrate,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier through the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a bush. The patient and the two other military members were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, padded toward the entrance to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”