🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees hide the entrance. One descending timber tunnel leads down to a brightly lit reception area. There is a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus cabinets full of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. In a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, doctors monitor a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they zigzag in the sky above.

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

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret underground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters under the ground. It’s the safest way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats 30-40 casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or severe stomach wounds. Others can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of Russian FPV drones, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We see few bullet injuries. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Major the senior surgeon at the subterranean installation for treating wounded troops in the eastern region.

During one day last week, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a small hole in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. My comrade beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Then the Russians released a second explosive on him.” He continued: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs all around and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

The soldier explained his squad spent 43 days in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their location was by walking. All supplies came by drone: rations and drinking water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked 5km (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him fresh civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a set of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, stated a FPV aerial device ripped a small hole in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I think I was lucky to survive. A relative has been killed. There are ongoing explosions.” A builder employed in Lithuania, he said he had returned to his homeland and volunteered to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the back. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, took off a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his sister. “A fragment of mortar hit me. The cause was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a few months. After that, to return to my military group. Our forces has to protect our country,” he affirmed.

Doctors treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the dorsal area by a fragment of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been killed in nearly 2,000 attacks. The underground facility is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and sand placed above reaching ground level. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges released by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the construction, plans to build twenty units in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally important for saving the survival of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, said certain injured personnel had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “We had a pair of severely injured casualties who came at 3am. I had to carry out a double amputation on a patient. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic surgeries? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier up the passage and into an ambulance. The transport was parked under a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were taken to the city of a major city for additional medical care. The underground medical team took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, walked toward the entrance to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”