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

Scrubby foliage hide the entrance. A sloping timber tunnel descends to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And cabinets full of healthcare supplies, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians monitor a display. It shows the movements of enemy spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

This is Ukraine’s covert underground medical facility. This center began operations in August and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the urban area of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters under the ground. This is the safest way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release explosives with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a new type of war,” the surgeon said.

During one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. My comrade next to me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Then the enemy forces dropped a second grenade on him.” He continued: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. There are UAVs everywhere and casualties. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his squad endured over a month in a forest area near the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to reach their position was by walking. All supplies arrived by quadcopter: food and water. Seven days following he was hurt, he traveled 5km (about 3 miles), taking several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his vital signs. Following care, a nurse provided him with new non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

A different casualty, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had left him with concussion. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I couldn’t feel anything or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to survive. A relative has been killed. We face ongoing detonations.” A builder working in Lithuania, he said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as doctors laid him on a bed, took off a stained bandage and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his family member. “A piece of artillery struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Someone has to defend our country,” he said.

Since 2022, enemy forces has consistently attacked hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. Per human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top up to the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices released by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the building, intends to build twenty facilities in total. A senior official of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “vitally essential for saving the lives of our military and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization described the project as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

Holovashchenko, explained certain injured personnel had to endure delays hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “We had a pair of critically ill patients who came at 3am. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. One must focus,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier up the passage and into an ambulance. The vehicle was parked beneath a bush. The patient and the other soldiers were taken to the city of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean medical team took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, padded toward the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”