Six Meters Under Ground, a Hidden Hospital Treats Ukraine's Troops Injured by Enemy Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Scrubby trees hide the entryway. One sloping timber passageway leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a surgery unit, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And shelves full of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors monitor a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Welcome to the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the earth. This is the safest way of providing help to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” stated the facility's surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 patients a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma requiring surgical removal, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can walk. Almost all are the casualties of Russian FPV drones, which drop grenades with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. This is an era of drones and a new type of war,” the surgeon explained.

During one afternoon last week, three soldiers limped into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV blast had torn a small hole in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Then the Russians released a second grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. We see UAVs all around and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured 43 days in a wooded zone close to Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: food and water. A week after he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his vital signs. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with new civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he said. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. My cousin has been killed. We face ongoing explosions.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, he noted he had returned to his homeland and volunteered to fight 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 medical cot, took off a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to call his family member. “A piece of artillery hit me. It was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. That will take a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Someone must defend our country,” he affirmed.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly attacked medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to human rights groups, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost 2,000 assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and granular material laid on top reaching the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even multiple 8kg TNT charges released by aerial means.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the building, plans to build 20 facilities in all. The head of the nation's national security council and ex- defence minister, the official, said they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented since the enemy's military offensive.

The surgeon, explained certain wounded soldiers had to endure delays hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “We had a pair of severely injured casualties who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for so long there was no other option.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled the soldier through the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed under a shrub. He and the other military members were taken to the city of a major city for further treatment. The underground medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, padded toward the entrance to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”