Six Meters Below the Earth, a Secret Hospital Treats Ukrainian Troops Injured by Enemy Drones

Scrubby trees conceal the entrance. A descending timber passageway descends to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And cabinets full of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians monitor a display. It shows the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

Welcome to the nation's covert underground hospital. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the ground. This is the most secure method of providing help to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty patients a each day. Their conditions vary. Some have devastating leg injuries requiring amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a new type of conflict,” the surgeon explained.

On one afternoon last week, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is horrific. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces dropped a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit spent 43 days in a wooded zone close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. Sole access to reach their location was on foot. All supplies came by quadcopter: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was injured, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant gave him new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, said a drone blast had resulted in a head injury. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been killed. We face ongoing detonations.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to serve days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the back. He groaned as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a stained dressing and treated his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his sister. “A fragment of mortar hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. This may require a few months. After that, to return to my military group. Our forces must protect our country,” he affirmed.

Over the past years, Russia has consistently targeted medical centers, clinics, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been killed in almost 2,000 attacks. The underground facility is built from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which funded the construction, plans to build 20 units in total. A senior official of the nation's security agency and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the survival of our military and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

The surgeon, said certain injured soldiers had to wait many hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated due to the danger of aerial attacks. “We had two severely injured casualties who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “I’ve been healthcare for two decades. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was stationed beneath a shrub. The patient and the other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, walked up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”