Six Metres Below Ground, a Secret Medical Facility Treats Ukrainian Troops Wounded by Enemy Drones

Scrubby foliage conceal the entryway. One sloping timber tunnel leads down to a well-illuminated reception area. There is a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, cardiac monitors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Welcome to the nation's covert underground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters below the ground. It’s the safest way of delivering care to our injured military personnel. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats 30-40 patients a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop explosives with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter few bullet injuries. This is an era of drones and a new type of war,” the surgeon said.

On one afternoon recently, three soldiers limped into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Then the enemy forces released a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. There are drones everywhere and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured 43 days in a wooded zone near the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to reach their position was on foot. Necessary provisions came by drone: rations and water. Seven days after he was injured, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a drone blast had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been killed. There are continuous explosions.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a stained bandage and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a mobile phone to call his sister. “A fragment of mortar struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a few months. After that, to return to my unit. Our forces has to defend our nation,” he said.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and granular material placed above up to the surface. It can withstand impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple 8kg TNT charges released by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to erect twenty facilities in total. A senior official of the nation's security agency and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically important for preserving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The company described the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s invasion.

The surgeon, explained certain injured soldiers had to wait many hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated due to the threat of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of severely injured patients who came at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs 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 surgeries? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean medical team took a break. The facility's ginger cat, the mascot, padded toward the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”