A Full Metres Under the Earth, a Secret Hospital Cares for Ukrainian Soldiers Wounded by Enemy Drones

Sparse trees hide the entryway. A sloping timber passageway descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they weave in the air above.

Welcome to the nation's covert underground hospital. This center began operations in August and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country not far from the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits six meters below the earth. This is the safest way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats 30-40 casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic leg injuries requiring amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which release grenades with lethal precision. “90% of our patients are from FPVs. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

During one day last week, a group of three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is terrible. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs all around and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit endured over a month in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to reach their position was on foot. All supplies arrived by drone: food and drinking water. A week following he was injured, he walked 5km (about 3 miles), taking three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medical staff assessed his vital signs. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. There are continuous explosions.” A construction worker employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his family member. “A piece of artillery hit me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Someone must defend our country,” he affirmed.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly targeted hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, 261 health workers have been killed in almost two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, soil and granular material placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even three 8kg explosive devices dropped by drone.

A major industrial group, which financed the construction, plans to build twenty facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- military leader, the official, said they would be “vitally essential for preserving the lives of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The company referred to the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken after Russia’s military offensive.

Holovashchenko, said some injured personnel had to wait many hours or even days before they could be evacuated due to the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two severely injured patients who came at 3am. I had to carry out a double amputation on a patient. His bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no other option.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “I’ve been healthcare for two decades. One must focus,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk through the passage and into an ambulance. The transport was parked under a shrub. The patient and the two other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of a major city for additional medical care. The underground medical team paused for rest. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, walked up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” the surgeon said. “The work is continuous.”