🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage hide the entrance. A sloping timber tunnel leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, cardiac monitors and ventilators. Plus shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of extra garments. Within a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital staff at an underground medical center observe a screen showing enemy kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the area.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret below-ground medical facility. The facility began operations in August and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits six meters below the ground. This is the most secure method of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” said the facility's surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic leg injuries requiring amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy FPV aerial devices, which release explosives with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We see few bullet injuries. This is an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground installation for caring for injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon last week, a group of three military members limped into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an FPV blast had ripped a small hole in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are drones everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit spent over a month in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to get to their position was by walking. Necessary provisions came by drone: food and drinking water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked 5km (about 3 miles), taking several hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medic checked his vital signs. Following care, a medical attendant provided him with fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a FPV drone caused a small hole in his leg.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a drone blast had resulted in concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I couldn’t feel any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been killed. We face ongoing explosions.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, he said he had returned to his homeland and enlisted to serve days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors placed him on a medical cot, removed a stained bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A fragment of artillery struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a few months. After that, to return to my unit. Someone has to defend our country,” he said.

Medical staff treat the wounded soldier, who was hit in the dorsal area by a piece of artillery shell.

Since 2022, Russia has repeatedly targeted medical centers, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. Per international monitors, 261 health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and granular material placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even three 8kg TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

A major steel and mining company, which funded the building, intends to erect twenty facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically important for preserving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The company described the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented since the enemy's military offensive.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

The surgeon, explained some injured soldiers had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “We had a pair of severely injured casualties who came at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. His tourniquet had been applied for such an extended period there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe operations? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies transported the soldier up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked beneath a bush. The patient and the other soldiers were transferred to the city of a major city for further treatment. The underground medical team took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked up to the entrance to greet the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”