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Scrubby foliage hide the entrance. One descending wooden passageway leads down to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, cardiac monitors and ventilators. And shelves full of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a break area with a washing machine and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a display. It shows the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical staff at an underground hospital look at a screen displaying enemy suicide and surveillance drones in the area.

This is Ukraine’s covert below-ground medical facility. This center began operations in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “We are 6 metres below the ground. It’s the most secure way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Maj the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma requiring amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of Russian FPV drones, which release explosives with lethal accuracy. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. This is an age of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for caring for wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one day recently, three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone blast had ripped a small hole in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Then the enemy forces dropped a another grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is destroyed. We see drones everywhere and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his squad endured 43 days in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to get to their position was on foot. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), taking three hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his vital signs. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him new non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device caused a minor injury in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a drone blast had resulted in concussion. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I believe I was lucky to survive. My cousin has been lost. There are ongoing detonations.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in early 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to call his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces has to defend our country,” he said.

Medical staff treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the dorsal area by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently targeted medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. Per human rights groups, 261 health workers have been fatally attacked in almost 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is built from multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and granular material laid on top up to the surface. It can withstand direct hits from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple 8kg explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to erect 20 units in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically important for preserving the lives of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The company described the initiative as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, explained certain injured soldiers had to wait many hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated because of the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of critically ill casualties who came at 3am. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. His bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “My career in medicine for two decades. One must concentrate,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed beneath a shrub. The patient and the two other military members were transferred to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground hospital staff took a break. The facility's orange feline, Vasilevs, walked toward the entrance to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”