🔗 Share this article

Scrubby trees hide the entrance. A descending timber tunnel leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors keep an eye on a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they zigzag in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an underground hospital observe a monitor showing Russian suicide and surveillance drones in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s covert below-ground hospital. The facility opened in August 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. “We are six meters under the earth. It’s the most secure way of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma requiring amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a new type of conflict,” the surgeon said.

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

On one afternoon last week, a group of three military members limped into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “War is horrific. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was killed,” he said. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians dropped a second grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is demolished. We see drones everywhere and casualties. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured 43 days in a wooded zone near the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to reach their location was by walking. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: rations and water. A week after he was injured, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to remain alive. A relative has been lost. We face ongoing detonations.” A builder working in Lithuania, he noted he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a medical cot, removed a bloody bandage and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his family member. “A fragment of mortar struck me. It was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a few months. After that, to return to my military group. Someone has to protect our country,” he said.

Doctors care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the dorsal area by a fragment of mortar.

Since 2022, Russia has repeatedly targeted hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, 261 health workers have been killed in almost 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and sand placed above reaching ground level. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by drone.

A major industrial group, which funded the construction, intends to erect 20 facilities in all. A senior official of the nation's national security council and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the survival of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the frontline.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

An example of the centre’s operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, explained some injured soldiers had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported because of the threat of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of severely injured casualties who arrived at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were transferred to the city of Dnipro for additional medical care. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The facility's orange feline, Vasilevs, walked up to the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”