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Sparse foliage hide the entrance. A sloping timber passageway leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a surgery unit, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of extra garments. Within a break area with a washing machine and hot water heater, physicians monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

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

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret below-ground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in the eastern part of the country not far from the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the earth. It’s the safest method of providing help to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats 30-40 casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or serious stomach wounds. Others can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which release grenades with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We see minimal bullet injuries. This is an age of unmanned aircraft and a new type of war,” the doctor explained.

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

During one day last week, a group of three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone explosion had torn a small hole in his leg. “Conflict is horrific. My comrade beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces released a another explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. There are drones all around and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his unit endured 43 days in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to get to their location was by walking. All supplies came by drone: food and water. Seven days following he was injured, he traveled 5km (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant gave him new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a FPV aerial device caused a small hole in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he explained. “I believe I was lucky to remain alive. My cousin has been lost. There are continuous detonations.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, took off a bloody dressing and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his family member. “A fragment of mortar struck me. It was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. This may require a few months. After that, to return to my unit. Our forces must defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Doctors treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost 2,000 attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and sand laid on top reaching the surface. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices released by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the building, intends to build twenty units in total. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- defence minister, the official, said they would be “critically essential for preserving the survival of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said some wounded soldiers had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported because of the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received two severely injured patients who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “My career in medicine for 20 years. One must focus,” he said.

Medical assistants transported Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed under a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, walked toward the doorway to greet the next arrivals. “We are open around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”