🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees hide the entryway. One sloping wooden passageway descends to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and ventilators. And shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, doctors keep an eye on a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

Medical staff at an subterranean medical center look at a monitor displaying enemy suicide and reconnaissance drones in the area.

This is the nation's covert underground hospital. The facility began operations in August and is the second of its kind, situated in the eastern part of the country not far from the frontline and the city of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the earth. It’s the safest way of providing help to our injured soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

This medical station treats thirty to forty casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma necessitating amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Others can move on their own. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which drop explosives with lethal accuracy. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a new type of war,” the surgeon said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for treating wounded soldiers in the eastern region.

During one day recently, three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an FPV explosion had torn a minor wound in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces dropped a second grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad endured over a month in a wooded zone close to the city, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to get to their position was by walking. Necessary provisions came by drone: rations and drinking water. A week following he was injured, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking several hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with fresh civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

The soldier, 28, stated a FPV drone caused a small hole in his leg.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in concussion. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I believe I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing explosions.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to serve days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a bed, took off a stained bandage and treated his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A piece of artillery struck me. It was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to go back to my unit. Someone must defend our nation,” he said.

Medical staff treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the dorsal area by a fragment of mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and granular material placed above up to the surface. It can withstand direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by drone.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the construction, plans to erect twenty facilities in all. The head of the nation's national security council and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The organization described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken after the enemy's invasion.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

The surgeon, said certain injured personnel had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported because of the danger of aerial attacks. “We had two critically ill casualties who came at the early hours. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. His tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with severe operations? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled the soldier up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a bush. The patient and the two other soldiers were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, walked toward the entrance to greet the next arrivals. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”