A Full Meters Under the Earth, a Hidden Medical Facility Cares for Ukrainian Soldiers Wounded by Russian Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Scrubby foliage hide the entrance. One descending wooden tunnel leads down to a brightly lit reception area. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of extra garments. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the movements of enemy spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

This is the nation's covert underground medical facility. This center began operations in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters under the ground. It’s the safest way of delivering care to our injured soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the facility's surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles thirty to forty casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries requiring amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which release explosives with lethal precision. “90% of our patients are from FPVs. We see minimal gunshot wounds. This is an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon said.

On one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an FPV explosion had torn a minor wound in his leg. “War is horrific. My comrade next to me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces dropped a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the village is demolished. There are drones everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier said his squad spent 43 days in a forest area close to the city, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to reach their position was on foot. All supplies arrived by drone: food and water. A week following he was injured, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. Following care, a nurse provided him with new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he explained. “I believe I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been killed. We face continuous detonations.” A builder employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had returned to his homeland and volunteered to fight shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in early 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors placed him on a bed, removed a bloody bandage and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of mortar hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To get better. This may require a few months. After that, to go back to my unit. Our forces has to defend our country,” he said.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly targeted hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which funded the construction, intends to erect twenty facilities in total. A senior official of the nation's security agency and former defence minister, the official, declared they would be “critically important for preserving the lives of our military and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

The surgeon, explained some injured soldiers had to endure delays hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated because of the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who came at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. His bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe operations? “I’ve been healthcare for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the other military members were transferred to the urban center of a major city for additional medical care. The subterranean medical team took a break. The facility's ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded toward the entrance to await the next arrivals. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “It doesn’t stop.”