🔗 Share this article

Sparse foliage hide the entrance. One sloping timber tunnel descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean hospital look at a screen displaying enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s covert below-ground hospital. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the earth. It’s the most secure method of delivering care to our injured soldiers. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles thirty to forty casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop explosives with deadly precision. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground installation for caring for wounded troops in eastern Ukraine.

On one day last week, a group of three soldiers limped into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an FPV explosion had torn a minor wound in his limb. “War is horrific. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces released a second grenade on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are drones all around and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit endured 43 days in a forest area close to the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: food and drinking water. A week after he was injured, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medic assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse provided him with new civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a FPV drone caused a small hole in his leg.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I couldn’t feel any feeling or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been killed. We face continuous detonations.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, he noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, removed a bloody bandage and treated his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his family member. “A fragment of mortar struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces has to protect our country,” he said.

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

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently targeted hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to international monitors, 261 health workers have been killed in nearly 2,000 assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, soil and sand placed above up to ground level. It can withstand impacts from 152mm projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which funded the construction, intends to erect twenty units in all. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically important for preserving the lives of our armed forces and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had undertaken since the enemy's invasion.

An example of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, explained certain wounded soldiers had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “We had a pair of critically ill patients who came at 3am. I had to carry out a double amputation on a patient. The soldier's tourniquet had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Medical assistants transported the soldier through the passage and into an ambulance. The transport was stationed beneath a bush. The patient and the two other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean medical team took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, walked toward the entrance to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”