🔗 Share this article

Scrubby foliage conceal the entryway. One sloping timber tunnel descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors monitor a display. The screen reveals the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

Medical staff at an subterranean medical center look at a monitor showing enemy kamikaze and surveillance drones in the region.

This is Ukraine’s covert below-ground medical facility. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the earth. It’s the most secure method of delivering care to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” stated the clinic’s lead doctor, Major the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles thirty to forty patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have devastating leg injuries requiring surgical removal, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly precision. “90% of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean facility for treating wounded soldiers in the eastern region.

On one afternoon recently, three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an FPV explosion had torn a minor wound in his leg. “Conflict is horrific. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians released a another explosive on him.” He continued: “All structures in the village is demolished. We see drones all around and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit spent 43 days in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to reach their position was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: food and drinking water. Seven days following he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking several hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with new civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, stated a first-person view aerial device ripped a small hole in his leg.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a drone blast had left him with a head injury. “I was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it went dark. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he said. “I believe I was fortunate to remain alive. My cousin has been lost. We face ongoing detonations.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’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 placed him on a medical cot, took off a bloody bandage and treated his recent injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to call his family member. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to go back to my military group. Our forces has to protect our nation,” he said.

Doctors treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a piece of mortar.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, health facilities, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in nearly 2,000 attacks. The underground facility is constructed from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand placed above reaching ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by drone.

A major industrial group, which financed the building, plans to build 20 facilities in total. The head of the nation's national security council and former military leader, the official, said they would be “critically important for preserving the lives of our military and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The organization described the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken after the enemy's invasion.

An example of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, said some injured soldiers had to wait hours or even days before they could be evacuated because of the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two severely injured patients who came at 3am. I had to carry out a double amputation on one of them. His tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “My career in healthcare for two decades. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was stationed under a bush. He and the two other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground medical team took a break. The facility's ginger cat, the mascot, padded up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”