🔗 Share this article

Sparse trees conceal the entryway. A descending timber tunnel leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with beds, cardiac monitors and ventilators. And shelves stocked of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors monitor a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical staff at an underground medical center look at a screen displaying Russian suicide and reconnaissance drones in the region.

This is Ukraine’s covert underground medical facility. The facility opened in August and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the urban area of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are 6 metres below the earth. It’s the most secure way of providing help to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles thirty to forty casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic leg injuries necessitating surgical removal, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. Almost all are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which drop explosives with lethal accuracy. “90% of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the surgeon said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for caring for wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

During one day recently, a group of three soldiers limped into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV blast had torn a minor wound in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Then the Russians released a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the village is demolished. There are drones all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier explained his squad endured 43 days in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize for many months. The only way to reach their position was by walking. All supplies came by quadcopter: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), taking several hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his vital signs. Following care, a nurse provided him with new non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored jeans.

The soldier, 28, stated a first-person view aerial device caused a minor injury in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel anything or any sound,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been lost. We face ongoing explosions.” A construction worker employed in Lithuania, he noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to serve shortly before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as doctors placed him on a bed, removed a bloody bandage and cleaned his recent injury from fragments. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his family member. “A piece of artillery hit me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Our forces must protect our nation,” he said.

Medical staff treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the back by a fragment of artillery shell.

Since 2022, enemy forces has consistently targeted medical centers, health facilities, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been killed in almost two thousand assaults. The underground facility is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and granular material laid on top reaching the surface. It can withstand impacts from 152mm projectiles and even three 8kg TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the construction, intends to build 20 facilities in all. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and former military leader, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had undertaken since Russia’s invasion.

An example of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, explained some wounded personnel had to endure delays hours or even days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “We had a pair of critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to carry out a double amputation on a patient. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no other option.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “My career in medicine for 20 years. One must focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was stationed under a shrub. He and the other military members were transferred to the urban center of a major city for additional medical care. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, padded toward the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are active around the clock,” Holovashchenko stated. “It doesn’t stop.”