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Scrubby foliage conceal the entrance. One sloping timber tunnel leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a operating ward, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they zigzag in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean medical center look at a screen displaying Russian kamikaze and surveillance drones in the area.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret below-ground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are six meters below the ground. It’s the safest method of delivering care to our injured soldiers. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” stated the clinic’s lead doctor, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter few gunshot wounds. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a new type of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for caring for wounded troops in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon recently, three military members limped into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Then the Russians released a second explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier said his unit endured 43 days in a wooded zone close to the city, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to get to their position was by walking. All supplies came by drone: rations and water. A week after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant provided him with new civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale jeans.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view drone caused a small hole in his lower limb.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had left him with concussion. “My position was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing explosions.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had returned to Ukraine and volunteered to fight days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the back. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a medical cot, removed a bloody bandage and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his sister. “A fragment of mortar 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 several months. After that, to return to my military group. Our forces has to defend our country,” he affirmed.

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

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. Per human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and granular material laid on top reaching ground level. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even three 8kg TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the construction, intends to erect 20 facilities in all. The head of the nation's security agency and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for preserving the survival of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The organization referred to the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had undertaken after Russia’s invasion.

One of the facility's operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, said some wounded personnel had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two severely injured casualties who arrived at the early hours. I had to perform a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic surgeries? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. One must focus,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. He and the two other military members were transferred to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, padded up to the entrance to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”