A Full Metres Below Ground, a Hidden Medical Facility Treats Ukrainian Soldiers Injured by Enemy Drones

Sparse trees hide the entrance. One descending wooden passageway leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. 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 weave in the sky above.

This is Ukraine’s covert below-ground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters below the earth. This is the safest way of providing help to our injured military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries requiring amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release explosives with lethal precision. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a new type of conflict,” the doctor explained.

On one afternoon last week, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is horrific. My comrade beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Then the Russians dropped a another explosive on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad spent over a month in a wooded zone close to the city, which Russia has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: rations and water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked 5km (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his vital signs. Following care, a nurse provided him with fresh non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

Another patient, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing explosions.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, he noted he had returned to his homeland and volunteered to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as doctors placed him on a medical cot, removed a bloody bandage and cleaned his recent injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Our forces has to defend our country,” he affirmed.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and sand placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges released by drone.

A major industrial group, which financed the building, intends to build twenty facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company referred to the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

The surgeon, explained some wounded soldiers had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported due to the danger of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. I had to perform a double amputation on a patient. His bleeding control device had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. One must focus,” he remarked.

Medical assistants transported the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a shrub. The patient and the two other military members were taken to the urban center of a major city for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, walked toward the doorway to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”