🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees hide the entryway. One descending timber passageway descends to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of extra garments. In a break area with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical staff at an underground medical center observe a monitor displaying enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance drones in the area.

Welcome to the nation's secret underground medical facility. This center began operations in August and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres under the ground. This is the safest way of providing help to our injured soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty patients a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic leg injuries requiring surgical removal, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which drop explosives with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a new type of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Maj the senior surgeon at the subterranean installation for caring for injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one day last week, three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old one soldier, said an FPV explosion had torn a small hole in his leg. “War is horrific. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit spent 43 days in a wooded zone close to the city, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to get to their position was on foot. All supplies arrived by quadcopter: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was injured, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his vital signs. Following care, a medical attendant provided him with new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, said a first-person view drone ripped a small hole in his lower limb.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a drone blast had resulted in concussion. “My position was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to survive. A relative has been lost. We face continuous detonations.” A builder employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk said 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 back. He expressed pain as doctors placed him on a bed, removed a stained dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to call his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to go back to my military group. Someone has to defend our nation,” he said.

Medical staff care for the wounded soldier, who was injured in the dorsal area by a piece of mortar.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells and even multiple 8kg explosive devices released by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which funded the building, intends to build twenty units in total. The head of the nation's security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for preserving the survival of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented after the enemy's invasion.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said some injured soldiers had to wait hours or even days before they could be transported because of the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. I had to perform a double amputation on a patient. His bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “My career in medicine for two decades. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked under a bush. He and the two other soldiers were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, walked up to the entrance to await the next arrivals. “We are open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”