🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage hide the entrance. A sloping wooden passageway descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians keep an eye on a screen. It shows the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean medical center observe a monitor showing Russian suicide and reconnaissance drones in the region.

This is the nation's covert underground hospital. The facility opened in August and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country not far from the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters under the ground. It’s the most secure method of providing help to our injured soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles thirty to forty casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating surgical removal, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. Almost all are the casualties of enemy FPV drones, which drop explosives with lethal accuracy. “90% of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. It’s an era of drones and a new type of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Major the senior surgeon at the underground facility for caring for wounded soldiers in the eastern region.

During one afternoon last week, three soldiers limped into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV explosion had torn a minor wound in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Then the Russians dropped a second grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are UAVs all around and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad spent 43 days in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. Sole access to reach their position was by walking. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: rations and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he traveled 5km (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse provided him with fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

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

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a drone blast had left him with a head injury. “My position was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was lucky to survive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing explosions.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had returned to his homeland and enlisted to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in early 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors laid him on a medical cot, removed a stained dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Someone has to defend our country,” he affirmed.

Medical staff treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the back by a piece of mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. Per international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and granular material laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple 8kg explosive devices released by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the construction, plans to build twenty facilities in all. A senior official of the nation's security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the lives of our military and assisting troops on the frontline.” The organization described the project as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had implemented after Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, explained certain wounded personnel had to endure delays hours or even days before they could be evacuated due to the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed beneath a bush. He and the two other military members were transferred to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The facility's ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded up to the doorway to await the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “It doesn’t stop.”