🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees conceal the entryway. A sloping wooden passageway descends to a brightly lit reception area. There is a operating ward, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors keep an eye on a screen. It shows the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean hospital observe a monitor showing Russian suicide and reconnaissance UAVs in the region.

This is the nation's covert underground medical facility. This center opened in August and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are 6 metres below the ground. This is the safest method of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles thirty to forty patients a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic leg injuries necessitating surgical removal, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. It’s an age of drones and a new type of war,” the surgeon explained.

Major the senior surgeon at the underground installation for caring for injured troops in eastern Ukraine.

During one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers limped into the hospital. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces dropped a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. We see drones all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad endured 43 days in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. The only way to reach their position was on foot. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: food and drinking water. Seven days following he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, 28, stated a first-person view drone ripped a minor injury 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 dugout. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to remain alive. My cousin has been killed. There are ongoing detonations.” A builder working in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been struck in the back. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his recent injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a mobile phone to call his family member. “A piece of artillery struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a few months. After that, to return to my military group. Our forces has to defend our nation,” he said.

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

Over the past years, Russia has consistently attacked hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. According to international monitors, 261 health workers have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand assaults. The underground facility is constructed from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and granular material placed above reaching the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the building, intends to erect twenty facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- defence minister, the official, said they would be “vitally essential for preserving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the frontline.” The organization described the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said certain wounded soldiers had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported because of the threat of air assaults. “We had a pair of critically ill casualties who came at 3am. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. His bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe operations? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. One must focus,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a bush. He and the other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, walked up to the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”