Six metres below ground, a hospital treats Ukrainian soldiers injured by Russian drones | Ukraine

S.scraggly trees hide the entrance. A curved wooden tunnel leads down to the brightly lit reception area. There is a surgery unit equipped with beds, heart monitors and ventilators. And shelves full of medical equipment, medications, and piles of clean spare clothes. Doctors watch the screen in the staff room, where there is a washing machine and a kettle. It shows the movements of Russian spy drones zigzagging across the sky above.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret underground hospital. The facility, which opened in August, is the second of its kind located in eastern Ukraine, not far from the front line and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 meters below the ground. This is the safest way to provide aid to our wounded soldiers. It also keeps medical personnel safe,” said Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko, the clinic’s surgeon.

30-40 patients are treated per day at the stabilization point. Conditions vary. Some have catastrophic leg injuries or serious stomach wounds that require amputation. Others can walk. Nearly all of them are victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones that drop grenades with deadly accuracy. “Ninety percent of our cases are from FPVs. We see very few gunshot wounds. This is the age of drones and a different kind of warfare,” the surgeon said.

One afternoon last week, three soldiers limped into the facility. Artem Dvorskyi, 28, who was the least injured, said the FPV explosion left a small hole in his leg. “The war is terrible. Vasyl, the man next to me, was killed,” he said. “He fell to the ground. Then the Russians threw a second grenade at him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are drones and corpses everywhere. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his unit spent 43 days in the forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to capture since last year. The only way to reach their location was to walk. All supplies arrived with the quadcopter: food and water. A week after he was injured, he walked 5 km (about 3 miles) and took three hours to get to where an armored vehicle could pick him up. A doctor at the clinic checked his vital signs. After treatment, a nurse gave him new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and light-colored jeans.

Another patient, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said that the drone explosion caused a concussion. “I was inside the shelter. Suddenly it got dark. I couldn’t feel or hear anything,” he said. “I think I’m lucky to be alive. My cousin was killed. There are explosions all the time.” Filipchuk, a builder working in Lithuania, said he returned to Ukraine and volunteered to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, was shot in the back. He groaned as the doctors laid him down on the bed, removed the bloody bandage, and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapping herself in a foil blanket, she borrowed a cell phone to call her sister. “A mortar hit me. It bounced off. I’m fine,” he said. What were their plans now? “To get better. This will take a few months. Then I need to return to my unit. Someone needs to defend our country,” he said.

Russia has repeatedly targeted hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances since 2022. Accordingly human rights groups261 healthcare workers lost their lives in nearly 2000 attacks. The underground facility is constructed from four steel bunkers in which wooden beams, soil and sand are laid down to ground level. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even three 8kg TNT charges dropped by a drone.

Ukrainian steel and mining company metinvestThe company financing the construction plans to build 20 units in total. Rustem Umerov, head of Ukraine’s national security council and former defense minister, said they would be “critical to save the lives of our military and support frontline defenders.” Metinvest described the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” project it has undertaken since the Russian invasion.

Surgeon Holovashchenko said that some wounded soldiers had to wait hours or even days before they could be evacuated due to the threat of air strikes. “We had two critically ill patients who arrived at 3 in the morning. I had to perform a double amputation on one of them. His tourniquet had been on for so long that there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “I’ve been in medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Officers carried Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was parked under a bush. He and two other soldiers were taken to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground medical team took a break. Vasilevs, the hospital’s ginger cat, moved towards the entrance to wait for the next arrivals. “We are open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”