🔗 Share this article

Scrubby trees conceal the entryway. A descending timber passageway leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a staff room 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.

Medical staff at an underground hospital look at a monitor displaying enemy suicide and surveillance drones in the area.

This is Ukraine’s covert underground hospital. This center opened in August and is the second of its kind, situated in the eastern part of the country close to the frontline and the urban area of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters below the earth. It’s the safest way of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles thirty to forty casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Some have devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Others can walk. Almost all are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which release explosives with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent 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.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for caring for wounded troops in the eastern region.

On one afternoon recently, a group of three military members limped into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an FPV blast had torn a small hole in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He collapsed. Subsequently the enemy forces released a second grenade on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit endured over a month in a forest area near the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to get to their position was by walking. Necessary provisions came by drone: food and water. A week following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medic checked his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant gave him new non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

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

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been killed. We face ongoing detonations.” A builder working in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, took off a bloody dressing and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his family member. “A fragment of artillery hit me. It was a deflected projectile. 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. Our forces must defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Medical staff care for the wounded soldier, who was hit in the dorsal area by a fragment of mortar.

Since 2022, Russia has consistently targeted medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost two thousand assaults. The underground facility is built from four steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and granular material placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the construction, plans to erect twenty facilities in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- defence minister, the official, said they would be “critically essential for preserving the survival of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the project as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

An example of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, said some injured personnel had to endure delays many hours or even days before they could be evacuated because of the danger of air assaults. “We had two severely injured casualties who arrived at the early hours. I had to perform a double amputation on a patient. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe operations? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was stationed under a shrub. He and the other military members were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded toward the doorway to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”