A Full Meters Under Ground, a Secret Medical Facility Treats Ukrainian Troops Injured by Russian Drones

Scrubby trees hide the entryway. One descending timber passageway leads down to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a break area with a washing machine and kettle, physicians monitor a screen. It shows the movements of Russian surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

This is Ukraine’s secret underground medical facility. This center opened in August and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country close to the combat zone and the urban area of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits six meters below the earth. It’s the safest method of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps healthcare workers protected,” stated the clinic’s lead doctor, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma requiring surgical removal, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop grenades with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. This is an age of drones and a new type of conflict,” the doctor said.

During one day recently, three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had torn a minor wound in his leg. “War is horrific. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Then the enemy forces dropped a another explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs all around and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his squad endured 43 days in a wooded zone close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to reach their position was by walking. All supplies arrived by drone: rations and water. A week after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant provided him with fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I couldn’t feel any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. My cousin has been killed. We face ongoing explosions.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, he said he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a medical cot, took off a bloody bandage and cleaned his recent injury from fragments. Covered in a thermal sheet, he used a cellphone to ring his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Someone has to protect our country,” he affirmed.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly targeted medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. According to international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and granular material placed above reaching ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which funded the building, intends to build twenty facilities in total. A senior official of Ukraine’s national security council and former defence minister, the official, declared they would be “critically important for saving the survival of our military and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The organization described the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

The surgeon, explained certain wounded personnel had to wait many hours or even days before they could be evacuated due to the threat of aerial attacks. “We had two critically ill patients who came at the early hours. It was necessary to carry out a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no other option.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “My career in medicine for two decades. One must focus,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was stationed under a shrub. The patient and the two other military members were taken to the city of a major city for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded up to the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”