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Scrubby foliage hide the entryway. One sloping timber passageway descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets stocked of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of extra garments. Within a break area with a washing machine and kettle, physicians monitor a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean hospital look at a monitor showing Russian kamikaze and reconnaissance drones in the region.

Welcome to the nation's secret below-ground medical facility. This center opened in August and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the earth. It’s the most secure method of providing help to our injured military personnel. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic leg injuries requiring amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. Almost all are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which drop explosives with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter few gunshot wounds. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a new type of war,” the doctor said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the underground facility for treating injured troops in the eastern region.

During one afternoon last week, a group of three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone explosion had torn a minor wound in his limb. “War is terrible. My comrade beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another explosive on him.” He continued: “All structures in the village is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit spent over a month in a wooded zone close to the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to reach their location was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: food and drinking water. A week following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medic checked his vital signs. Following care, a nurse gave him new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, said a FPV drone ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a drone blast had resulted in a head injury. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing detonations.” A construction worker employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a stained bandage and treated his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to ring his sister. “A piece of mortar struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Someone must defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Doctors treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a piece of artillery shell.

Since 2022, Russia has consistently targeted hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. Per human rights groups, 261 health workers have been killed in almost 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is built from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand laid on top reaching the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple 8kg explosive devices released by drone.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to erect 20 facilities in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and former military leader, the official, said they would be “critically important for saving the survival of our armed forces and supporting troops on the frontline.” The company described the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

An example of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said some wounded personnel had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the threat of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of critically ill casualties who arrived at the early hours. I had to perform a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “I’ve been healthcare for two decades. One must focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed under a bush. He and the other military members were transferred to the urban center of a major city for additional medical care. The subterranean hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's ginger cat, the mascot, padded up to the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”