🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees hide the entrance. One sloping timber tunnel descends to a brightly lit reception area. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And cabinets stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors monitor a display. It shows the movements of Russian surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical personnel at an underground hospital look at a monitor showing enemy kamikaze and surveillance drones in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s covert underground hospital. This center opened in August and is the second such installation, situated in the eastern part of the country close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the ground. This is the most secure method of providing help to our injured military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 patients a day. Their conditions vary. Some have devastating limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or serious abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of enemy FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see few gunshot wounds. This is an era of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor said.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean facility for treating injured troops in eastern Ukraine.

During one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had torn a small hole in his limb. “War is horrific. My comrade next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his squad spent over a month in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to get to their position was by walking. All supplies came by drone: rations and drinking water. Seven days following he was injured, he traveled 5km (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medic assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a drone blast had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been killed. We face ongoing detonations.” A construction worker employed in a neighboring country, he noted he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to fight days before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, removed a stained bandage and treated his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery struck me. It was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces must protect our country,” he affirmed.

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

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been killed in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and granular material placed above up to the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges released by drone.

A major industrial group, which financed the building, intends to erect 20 units in all. A senior official of the nation's security agency and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

An example of the facility's operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, explained certain injured personnel had to endure delays hours or even days before they could be transported due to the danger of aerial attacks. “We had two critically ill casualties who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. One must concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a bush. He and the two other military members were transferred to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, padded toward the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”