🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees conceal the entrance. A sloping wooden tunnel descends to a brightly lit reception area. There is a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And shelves stocked of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of extra garments. Within a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, doctors keep an eye on a screen. It shows the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean medical center observe a monitor showing enemy suicide and surveillance UAVs in the area.

Welcome to the nation's secret underground hospital. The facility opened in August and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the earth. It’s the most secure method of delivering care to our injured military personnel. And it keeps healthcare workers protected,” stated the facility's lead doctor, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma requiring amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian FPV drones, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We see few gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a new type of conflict,” the surgeon said.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean installation for treating wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one day recently, three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had torn a minor wound in his limb. “War is terrible. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Then the enemy forces released a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. We see drones all around and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

The soldier explained his unit spent 43 days in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to get to their position was by walking. All supplies arrived by quadcopter: rations and drinking water. Seven days after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his vital signs. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with fresh civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a set of light-colored jeans.

The soldier, 28, said a first-person view aerial device ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, said a drone blast had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been killed. There are continuous detonations.” A builder working in Lithuania, he said he had returned to his homeland and volunteered to serve days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to call his family member. “A piece of mortar struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a several months. After that, to go back to my military group. Our forces must protect our nation,” he said.

Medical staff care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the dorsal area by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently targeted hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost 2,000 attacks. The underground facility is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and granular material laid on top up to the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the construction, plans to build twenty units in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and former defence minister, the official, said they would be “critically essential for saving the lives of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The organization referred to the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented since the enemy's military offensive.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, explained certain wounded personnel had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported because of the danger of air assaults. “We had two critically ill casualties who arrived at the early hours. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “My career in medicine for two decades. One must focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier through the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a bush. The patient and the two other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, walked toward the entrance to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”