A Full Meters Below Ground, a Hidden Hospital Cares for Ukraine's Troops Injured by Enemy Drones

Scrubby foliage conceal the entryway. One descending wooden tunnel descends to a brightly lit reception area. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In a break area with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. The screen reveals the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret underground medical facility. The facility began operations in August and is the second of its kind, situated in the eastern part of the country close to the frontline and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits six meters below the ground. It’s the safest way of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles 30-40 patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Others can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which release explosives with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We see few bullet injuries. This is an age of drones and a new type of war,” the doctor explained.

On one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is horrific. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the Russians dropped a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his squad endured over a month in a forest area close to the city, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to get to their location was on foot. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: food and drinking water. A week following he was injured, he traveled 5km (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse gave him new non-military attire: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, said a drone blast had resulted in concussion. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to remain alive. My cousin has been killed. We face ongoing detonations.” A builder working in Lithuania, he said he had returned to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as doctors placed him on a bed, took off a stained dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to call his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to return to my military group. Someone must defend our nation,” he said.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. Per international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost 2,000 attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and sand placed above reaching the surface. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the construction, intends to erect twenty facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “vitally essential for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

Holovashchenko, explained some injured personnel had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured casualties who arrived at the early hours. I had to carry out a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “My career in healthcare for two decades. One must concentrate,” he said.

Orderlies transported Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was parked under a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were taken to the city of a major city for additional medical care. The subterranean hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, padded toward the doorway to await the next arrivals. “We are open around the clock,” Holovashchenko stated. “It doesn’t stop.”