A Full Metres Under the Earth, a Secret Medical Facility Cares for Ukrainian Soldiers Injured by Enemy Drones

Scrubby trees hide the entryway. A descending timber passageway leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a surgery unit, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of extra garments. In a break area with a washing machine and hot water heater, physicians monitor a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they weave in the air above.

This is the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country close to the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the ground. It’s the most secure method of providing help to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” said the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles thirty to forty patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating surgical removal, or severe abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of enemy FPV aerial devices, which drop explosives with lethal accuracy. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter few bullet injuries. This is an age of drones and a different kind of war,” the surgeon said.

On one day last week, three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV blast had torn a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is horrific. My comrade next to me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces released a second grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his squad endured 43 days in a forest area near the city, which Russia has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: food and drinking water. A week following he was injured, he traveled 5km (about 3 miles), taking three hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had left him with concussion. “I was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to survive. My cousin has been killed. There are continuous explosions.” A builder working in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to serve shortly before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the back. He groaned as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a stained bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his family member. “A piece of artillery hit me. The cause was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces must defend our country,” he affirmed.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly attacked hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. Per international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm projectiles and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which funded the construction, plans to build 20 units in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally essential for saving the survival of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the frontline.” The organization described the initiative as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had undertaken after Russia’s invasion.

Holovashchenko, explained some wounded personnel had to endure delays hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated because of the danger of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of severely injured patients who arrived at the early hours. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on a patient. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no other option.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was stationed beneath a bush. He and the two other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded toward the doorway to await the next arrivals. “We are active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “The work is continuous.”