🔗 Share this article

Scrubby trees hide the entrance. One sloping timber passageway descends to a brightly lit reception area. There is a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets stocked of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

Medical staff at an underground medical center observe a monitor displaying Russian suicide and reconnaissance UAVs in the area.

This is the nation's secret below-ground hospital. This center began operations in August and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country close to the frontline and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres under the earth. It’s the most secure way of delivering care to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles 30-40 patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic limb trauma necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which release explosives with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We see few gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a new type of war,” the doctor said.

Major the senior surgeon at the underground installation for treating injured soldiers in the eastern region.

On one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had torn a small hole in his limb. “War is terrible. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs everywhere and casualties. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his squad spent over a month in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to reach their location was by walking. All supplies arrived by drone: rations and water. Seven days following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic checked his vital signs. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, said a first-person view aerial device caused a minor injury in his lower limb.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he said. “I believe I was fortunate to remain alive. My cousin has been lost. We face continuous detonations.” A builder employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to fight days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the back. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a bed, removed a stained bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his family member. “A piece of artillery struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Our forces has to defend our nation,” he said.

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

Since 2022, Russia has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. According to human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand placed above reaching the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even three 8kg explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

A major steel and mining company, which funded the construction, plans to erect 20 units in total. A senior official of the nation's security agency and former military leader, the official, said they would be “critically important for preserving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the frontline.” The company referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented after Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

The surgeon, said some wounded soldiers had to endure delays hours or even days before they could be transported because of the threat of air assaults. “We had a pair of critically ill patients who came 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. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk through the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. He and the other military members were taken to the city of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked up to the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”