🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage conceal the entrance. One descending timber passageway leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital staff at an underground hospital observe a monitor displaying enemy suicide and surveillance UAVs in the region.

This is Ukraine’s covert underground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month 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 six meters below the ground. It’s the safest way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries requiring amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of enemy FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We encounter few gunshot wounds. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a new type of war,” the surgeon said.

Major the senior surgeon at the subterranean installation for treating wounded troops in the eastern region.

During one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an FPV explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces released a another explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are drones all around and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

The soldier explained his squad endured 43 days in a forest area near the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to get to their location was on foot. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: rations and water. A week after he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, said a first-person view aerial device ripped a small hole in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it became black. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been killed. There are continuous explosions.” A builder working in Lithuania, he noted he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to serve shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a bed, removed a bloody bandage and cleaned his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery struck me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. That will take a few months. Subsequently, to return to my military group. Our forces has to defend our country,” he affirmed.

Medical staff treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently attacked hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. Per international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand assaults. The underground facility is built from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil 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 released by drone.

A major industrial group, which financed the building, plans to erect twenty facilities in total. A senior official of the nation's national security council and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically essential for preserving the survival of our military and assisting troops on the frontline.” The organization referred to the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, explained some injured personnel had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated because of the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who came at the early hours. I had to carry out a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier up the passage and into an ambulance. The transport was parked beneath a bush. He and the other military members were taken to the city of a major city for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked toward the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are open 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”