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Scrubby foliage conceal the entrance. A sloping wooden passageway descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And cabinets full of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital staff at an subterranean medical center observe a monitor showing enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the region.

This is the nation's covert underground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the earth. This is the most secure way of delivering care to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of enemy FPV drones, which drop explosives with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a new type of conflict,” the doctor said.

Major the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for treating wounded troops in the eastern region.

During one day recently, a group of three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a second grenade on him.” He continued: “All structures in the village is demolished. We see UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured 43 days in a forest area close to the city, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to reach their location was on foot. Necessary provisions came by drone: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking several hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him new civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a FPV aerial device caused a small hole in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a UAV explosion 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 killed. We face continuous explosions.” A builder working in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to serve days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff placed him on a medical cot, removed a stained dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his sister. “A fragment of mortar struck me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To recover. That will take a few months. After that, to return to my unit. Someone has to defend our country,” he affirmed.

Doctors care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the dorsal area by a piece of mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted hospitals, health facilities, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and sand placed above up to the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the construction, plans to build twenty facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our military and supporting defenders on the frontline.” The organization described the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

One of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, said certain wounded soldiers had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received two severely injured patients who came at 3am. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed under a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were taken to the urban center of a major city for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded up to the doorway to await the incoming patients. “We are active around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”