A Full Metres Under Ground, a Hidden Medical Facility Treats Ukrainian Troops Injured by Enemy Drones

Scrubby trees conceal the entrance. A sloping wooden passageway descends to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians keep an eye on a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

This is the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the urban area of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the earth. This is the safest way of delivering care to our injured soldiers. It also ensures healthcare workers safe,” stated the facility's surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic limb trauma requiring amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. Almost all are the casualties of Russian FPV aerial devices, which drop grenades with deadly precision. “90% of our patients are from FPVs. We see few gunshot wounds. This is an era of drones and a different kind of war,” the doctor explained.

During one afternoon last week, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone blast had torn a minor wound in his limb. “War is terrible. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was killed,” he stated. “He collapsed. Then the Russians released a second grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see drones everywhere and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier explained his squad spent over a month in a forest area close to the city, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: rations and water. A week after he was hurt, he traveled 5km (about 3 miles), taking several hours, to a point 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 fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a drone blast had left him with concussion. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been killed. We face ongoing explosions.” A construction worker employed in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to fight shortly before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a bloody bandage and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to call his sister. “A piece of artillery hit me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to return to my military group. Someone has to protect our country,” he affirmed.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. Per international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and sand laid on top up to the surface. It can withstand impacts from 152mm projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the building, plans to build twenty facilities in all. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally important for saving the survival of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the frontline.” The company described the initiative as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had undertaken after Russia’s invasion.

Holovashchenko, explained some wounded personnel had to wait hours or even days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured patients who came at the early hours. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he remarked.

Medical assistants transported the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed 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 hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, walked toward the doorway to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”