🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage hide the entryway. A descending timber passageway descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a operating ward, equipped with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets stocked of healthcare supplies, drugs and neat piles of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean hospital look at a screen showing Russian kamikaze and reconnaissance drones in the area.

This is Ukraine’s secret below-ground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters below the ground. It’s the safest method of providing help to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures healthcare workers safe,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles 30-40 casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma requiring surgical removal, or serious stomach wounds. Others can walk. Almost all are the casualties of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We see minimal bullet injuries. It’s an era of drones and a new type of conflict,” the doctor said.

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

During one afternoon recently, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is terrible. My comrade next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces dropped a another explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs everywhere and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad endured 43 days in a forest area close to the city, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to reach their position was on foot. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: rations and drinking water. Seven days following he was injured, he traveled 5km (about 3 miles), taking three hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his physical condition. Following care, a nurse gave him new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, said a FPV aerial device caused a minor injury in his lower limb.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “My position was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he said. “I think I was lucky to survive. My cousin has been killed. There are continuous detonations.” A construction worker employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a stained dressing and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his sister. “A piece of artillery hit me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Our forces has to protect our country,” he affirmed.

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

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, 261 health workers have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand placed above up to the surface. It can withstand impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices released by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the construction, intends to build twenty units 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 lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented since the enemy's invasion.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, said certain injured soldiers had to endure delays hours or even days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “We had a pair of critically ill patients who came at 3am. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “My career in medicine for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk through the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a bush. The patient and the two other military members were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, walked up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are open 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”