Six Meters Below Ground, a Hidden Hospital Treats Ukraine's Soldiers Wounded by Russian Drones

Scrubby trees hide the entryway. A sloping wooden passageway descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. Within a break area with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors monitor a display. The screen reveals the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

Welcome to the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. The facility began operations in August and is the second such installation, situated in the eastern part of the country not far from the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters under the ground. This is the most secure method of providing help to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures healthcare workers safe,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats thirty to forty patients a day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic leg injuries necessitating amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Others can move on their own. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop grenades with lethal precision. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. This is an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon said.

On one day recently, 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 blast had torn a minor wound in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is demolished. There are drones everywhere and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit spent over a month in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their location was by walking. All supplies came by drone: food and water. A week following he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse gave him new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had left him with concussion. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly went dark. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he said. “I believe I was lucky to survive. A relative has been lost. We face continuous detonations.” A construction worker employed in Lithuania, he said he had returned to Ukraine and volunteered to serve days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, removed a stained dressing and cleaned his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his family member. “A fragment of mortar struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed 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 nation,” he said.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in nearly 2,000 attacks. The underground facility is built from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and sand placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

A major steel and mining company, which funded the construction, plans to build twenty facilities in total. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- defence minister, the official, said they would be “critically important for preserving the survival of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The company described the initiative as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

Holovashchenko, explained some wounded personnel had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill patients who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to carry out a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. One must concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed under a bush. The patient and the two other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, padded toward the doorway to greet the next arrivals. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”