Six Meters Below the Earth, a Secret Medical Facility Cares for Ukrainian Soldiers Wounded by Russian Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Scrubby trees conceal the entryway. A descending wooden tunnel descends to a well-illuminated reception area. There is a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a screen. It shows the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

This is Ukraine’s secret below-ground hospital. This center began operations in August and is the second of its kind, located in the eastern part of the country close to the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the earth. It’s the most secure method of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures healthcare workers safe,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats 30-40 patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian FPV drones, which release explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter few gunshot wounds. This is an age of drones and a different kind of war,” the surgeon said.

On one day last week, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an FPV blast had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “War is horrific. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians released a another grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are drones everywhere and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured over a month in a wooded zone close to the city, which Russia has been trying to seize for many months. The only way to reach their location was by walking. All supplies came by quadcopter: food and drinking water. A week following he was hurt, he traveled 5km (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic assessed his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant provided him with fresh non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been lost. We face continuous explosions.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He groaned as doctors laid him on a medical cot, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery struck me. It was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a few months. After that, to return to my unit. Someone has to protect our country,” he said.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, health facilities, obstetric units and ambulances. According to human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and sand placed above up to the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even multiple 8kg TNT charges dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the building, plans to build 20 facilities in total. The head of the nation's security agency and former military leader, the official, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the survival of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company described the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

The surgeon, explained some injured personnel had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two severely injured casualties who arrived at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. His tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope 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 beneath a shrub. He and the other military members were transferred to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground medical team took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, padded toward the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”