Father and son perform surgery underground in Ukraine

IOL News

18-06-2025

A serviceman steps out of an evacuation vehicle after suffering a shrapnel wound to the thigh from a drone-dropped munition. The hospital's fortified access route allows soldiers to be brought directly into the underground medical complex.
JUST a few miles from the front line in eastern Ukraine, almost 20 feet below the surface, the day begins with a brief five-minute exchange between two surgeons - a father and his son.
They embrace, swap a few words about the night shift and that evening's Champions League soccer match, then part ways again - one to rest, the other to begin another 48-hour shift in the underground field hospital where they work.
Viacheslav, the father, is a trauma specialist with combat experience dating back to 2015 and the war against Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk. His son Andriy joined his medical unit in 2023. Once they worked together in a district hospital to the west, in a small town near the Moldovan border.
Now they work underground.
When Andriy arrived for his first stint as a combat surgeon, there was little time for reflection. 'I just worked,' he said. It was here that he performed his first amputations - sometimes five in a row. 'After the fifth one, it really got to me. But people adapt. Then shelling starts, and you don't even flinch. You just think, 'It won't hit here.''
But often it does, and that's why they sought safety in the earth.
The hospital is a prototype, a new approach, after years of what the Ukrainians characterise as the systematic Russian targeting of their medical facilities.
'Medics are especially vulnerable,' said Lt. Col. Yuriy Palamarchuk, the head of the hospital's surgical unit. 'They're not hiding behind armor. In field evacuations, they think of no one but the wounded. The Russians know this - they hunt medics. It's targeted terror.'
Russia's Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment about targeting field medical facilities, which is a war crime.
Capt. Oleksii oversees the facility, which he said they built on their own with the help of donations after other facilities near the front lines were hit.
'If we'd assumed from the start that Russia wouldn't fight by the rules, maybe we'd have built differently. Back then, we used NATO-style field hospitals - modular, clean, visible. Too visible. They were easy targets.'
The structure is a combination of wood and metal barrels sunk into the ground - but not with concrete, which the medics fear would have attracted too much attention from Russian surveillance drones.
Palamarchuk said the hospital has endured several near misses - explosions within 10 to 20 yards.
At the heart of the hospital lies the triage platform flanked by two operating theaters and then a recovery area. There are no beds as the patients don't stay for long and are sent on as soon as they are stable.
'We stabilize, operate and resuscitate. But we don't hospitalise. No beds. No overnight stays. You wake the patient up - and send them out,' Oleksii said. 'If we have enough vehicles, we can take 200 to 400 people a day.'
That night, everything was calm. The silence underground was so deep it was easy to forget that war raged just a few miles away. In the rest area, someone was on the PlayStation. Another medic read a book in the freshly cleaned operating room. A few were already settling into bed.
Just as darkness fell, a signal announced an incoming evacuation vehicle, but it was being tailed by a Russian drone.
Inside the vehicle were three lightly wounded soldiers. They walked on their own into the intake area. Their uniforms were removed - whether stained with blood or caked in mud - and replaced with pajamas and soft pink slippers. The slippers drew laughter, even amid the pain.
When everything quieted, distant explosions resumed - walls trembled, earth fell from wooden beams above. The medics were already asleep, as though they hadn't treated
Viacheslav admits he's nearly out of strength - but as long as he's still here, it means there's something left.
'Today was my daughter's last day of school,' he added. 'I watched the video. And it was enough.'