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Sparse trees hide the entryway. One sloping timber passageway descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the movements of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean hospital look at a screen displaying Russian kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the region.

This is the nation's secret underground medical facility. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the earth. This is the most secure way of delivering care to our injured soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 patients a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or severe abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy FPV drones, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground installation for treating injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one day last week, three soldiers limped into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an FPV blast had torn a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. My comrade next to me, Vasyl, was killed,” he stated. “He collapsed. Then the Russians released a second explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his unit endured 43 days in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to reach their location was on foot. All supplies arrived by quadcopter: food and water. Seven days after he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his vital signs. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a FPV drone caused a small hole in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to remain alive. A relative has been lost. We face continuous detonations.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had come back to his homeland and volunteered to serve days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors laid him on a bed, took off a stained bandage and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his family member. “A fragment of artillery struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces must protect our country,” he affirmed.

Medical staff care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the dorsal area by a fragment of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is built from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and granular material laid on top reaching ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple 8kg explosive devices released by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the building, intends to erect 20 units in all. A senior official of the nation's security agency and former defence minister, the official, said they would be “vitally important for saving the lives of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said certain wounded soldiers had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated due to the danger of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two severely injured casualties who arrived at 3am. I had to carry out a double amputation on one of them. His bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Orderlies transported Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the other soldiers were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, padded up to the doorway to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”