Six Meters Below Ground, a Hidden Hospital Cares for Ukrainian Soldiers Wounded by Enemy Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Scrubby trees hide the entryway. One sloping wooden passageway leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And cabinets full of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the movements of Russian surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

This is Ukraine’s covert below-ground medical facility. The facility opened in August and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the ground. It’s the most secure method of providing help to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which drop grenades with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We see minimal bullet injuries. This is an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon said.

On one afternoon last week, a group of three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV explosion had torn a small hole in his limb. “Conflict is horrific. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces released a another grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are drones all around and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his unit spent over a month in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their location was on foot. All supplies came by quadcopter: food and water. A week after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his vital signs. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a drone blast had resulted in a head injury. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel anything or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been lost. There are continuous detonations.” A builder employed in Lithuania, he said he had returned to his homeland and enlisted to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors placed him on a medical cot, removed a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery hit me. It was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces must protect our country,” he affirmed.

Since 2022, Russia has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost two thousand assaults. The underground facility is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and sand laid on top reaching ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple 8kg explosive devices released by aerial means.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the building, plans to build 20 units in total. A senior official of the nation's security agency and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting troops on the frontline.” The company referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken since Russia’s invasion.

Holovashchenko, said some wounded soldiers had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported due to the threat of aerial attacks. “We had two critically ill patients who came at the early hours. I had to perform a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no other option.” What is his method with traumatic surgeries? “My career in medicine for 20 years. One must focus,” he said.

Orderlies transported Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the other soldiers were taken to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground medical team took a break. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, padded toward the doorway to greet the next arrivals. “We are open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”