🔗 Share this article

Sparse foliage hide the entryway. A descending timber passageway leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, equipped with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. In a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors keep an eye on a screen. It shows the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Hospital staff at an underground medical center observe a screen showing Russian kamikaze and surveillance drones in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret underground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the ground. This is the safest method of providing help to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Some have devastating limb trauma necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. This is an era of drones and a new type of war,” the surgeon explained.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for treating injured soldiers in the eastern region.

During one afternoon last week, three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an FPV blast had torn a minor wound in his leg. “Conflict is horrific. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “All structures in the village is demolished. We see drones everywhere and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit spent over a month in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to get to their position was on foot. All supplies came by drone: food and water. A week following he was hurt, he traveled 5km (about 3 miles), taking several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his vital signs. After treatment, a nurse provided him with new civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a FPV aerial device caused a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. There are continuous detonations.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, he noted he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to serve shortly before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a stained dressing and cleaned his recent injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his family member. “A piece of mortar hit me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Someone has to defend 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 repeatedly targeted medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, 261 health workers have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand laid on top up to ground level. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple 8kg TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which funded the construction, plans to build twenty units in total. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- defence minister, the official, said they would be “critically essential for saving the survival of our military and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented after the enemy's invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, explained certain injured soldiers had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported because of the danger of air assaults. “We had a pair of severely injured patients who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to carry out a double amputation on a patient. His bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. One must concentrate,” he said.

Orderlies transported the soldier through the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was parked beneath a bush. He and the other soldiers were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, walked toward the doorway to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”