🔗 Share this article

Sparse foliage hide the entryway. One descending wooden passageway descends to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of extra garments. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean medical center observe a screen displaying enemy kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret below-ground hospital. This center opened in August and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the earth. This is the safest way of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” stated the clinic’s lead doctor, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have devastating limb trauma necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. Almost all are the casualties of Russian FPV drones, which release explosives with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see few bullet injuries. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon explained.

Maj the senior surgeon at the underground installation for caring for injured soldiers in the eastern region.

During one day last week, three military members limped into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces released a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see drones all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier said his squad endured over a month in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their position was on foot. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: rations and water. A week after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic assessed his vital signs. After treatment, a nurse provided him with fresh non-military attire: a T-shirt and a set of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a FPV drone ripped a minor injury in his leg.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a drone blast had resulted in concussion. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to remain alive. My cousin has been lost. We face ongoing explosions.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had come back to his homeland and volunteered to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as doctors placed him on a bed, took off a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a mobile phone to call his family member. “A piece of artillery hit me. It was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Our forces must protect our country,” he affirmed.

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

Over the past years, Russia has consistently attacked medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. According to human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost two thousand attacks. The underground facility is built from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and sand laid on top up to the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by drone.

A major industrial group, which funded the building, intends to build 20 units in total. The head of the nation's security agency and former military leader, the official, declared they would be “vitally important for preserving the lives of our military and assisting troops on the frontline.” The company described the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken after Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said some injured personnel had to wait hours or even days before they could be evacuated due to the threat of air assaults. “We had two severely injured patients who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. His tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground medical team took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, walked toward the entrance to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”