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Sparse trees conceal the entrance. A sloping timber tunnel leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a operating ward, equipped with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of extra garments. In a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

Hospital staff at an subterranean hospital observe a screen showing Russian suicide and surveillance drones in the region.

Welcome to the nation's secret below-ground medical facility. The facility began operations in August and is the second such installation, situated in the eastern part of the country close to the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits six meters under the ground. It’s the safest method of providing help to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” stated the clinic’s lead doctor, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which drop grenades with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground installation for treating injured soldiers in the eastern region.

On one afternoon last week, a group of three soldiers limped into the facility. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV blast had torn a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. We see drones everywhere and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

The soldier explained his unit spent 43 days in a wooded zone near the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to reach their location was on foot. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: rations and drinking water. Seven days following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a FPV aerial device ripped a small hole in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “My position was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to survive. A relative has been killed. We face ongoing detonations.” A builder working in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a medical cot, took off a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A piece of artillery hit me. The cause was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces must defend our country,” he said.

Medical staff care for the wounded soldier, who was hit in the dorsal area by a piece of mortar.

Since 2022, Russia has repeatedly targeted hospitals, health facilities, obstetric units and ambulances. According to human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been killed in almost 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is built from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and granular material laid on top up to ground level. It is designed to resist direct hits from large-caliber projectiles and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which funded the construction, plans to erect twenty facilities in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s national security council and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “vitally essential for preserving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization described the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's invasion.

One of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, said certain injured personnel had to endure delays hours or even days before they could be evacuated because of the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured patients who came at 3am. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. His bleeding control device had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe operations? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. You have to concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. He and the other soldiers were taken to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked toward the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are active around the clock,” Holovashchenko stated. “It doesn’t stop.”