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Scrubby foliage hide the entrance. A sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and ventilators. Plus cabinets stocked of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the movements of Russian spy drones as they zigzag in the air above.

Hospital staff at an subterranean medical center look at a screen showing Russian kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the area.

Welcome to the nation's secret underground medical facility. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country not far from the frontline and the city of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “We are 6 metres below the ground. It’s the safest way of delivering care to our injured soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel protected,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries requiring surgical removal, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of enemy FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with lethal precision. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter few gunshot wounds. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a new type of conflict,” the surgeon explained.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean facility for treating injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one day last week, a group of three soldiers limped into the hospital. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had torn a minor wound in his leg. “War is horrific. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces released a second grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. There are drones all around and casualties. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit spent 43 days in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to get to their position was by walking. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: rations and drinking water. Seven days following he was hurt, he traveled 5km (about 3 miles), taking three hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, said a first-person view drone caused a minor injury in his lower limb.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “My position was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation anything or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to remain alive. A relative has been lost. We face continuous detonations.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to fight shortly before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in early 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as doctors placed him on a medical cot, took off a bloody bandage and treated his recent injury from fragments. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a several months. After that, to return to my unit. Someone has to protect our nation,” he said.

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

Since 2022, Russia has repeatedly attacked medical centers, health facilities, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in almost 2,000 attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and granular material placed above reaching the surface. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even multiple 8kg explosive devices dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the building, plans to build twenty facilities in total. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “vitally important for preserving the survival of our military and supporting troops on the frontline.” The organization described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented since the enemy's military offensive.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, explained certain wounded soldiers had to endure delays hours or even days before they could be transported because of the threat of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of severely injured casualties who came at 3am. I had to carry out a double amputation on a patient. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no other option.” What is his method with traumatic surgeries? “My career in healthcare for two decades. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled the soldier up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a shrub. The patient and the two other soldiers were taken to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground medical team paused for rest. The facility's orange feline, Vasilevs, walked up to the doorway to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”