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Sparse foliage conceal the entryway. A descending timber passageway descends to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets full of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, doctors keep an eye on a screen. It shows the movements of Russian spy drones as they zigzag in the air above.

Hospital staff at an subterranean medical center look at a screen displaying Russian suicide and reconnaissance UAVs in the region.

This is Ukraine’s covert below-ground medical facility. This center began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country close to the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits six meters under the earth. It’s the safest method of delivering care to our injured military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles thirty to forty casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma requiring surgical removal, or serious stomach wounds. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which drop explosives with deadly precision. “90% of our patients are from FPVs. We see minimal gunshot wounds. This is an era of drones and a new type of war,” the surgeon said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the underground facility for treating injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

During one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had torn a small hole in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians released a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Ours and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his unit spent 43 days in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to reach their position was on foot. All supplies arrived by drone: rations and water. Seven days following he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant provided him with fresh non-military attire: a T-shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, 28, said a first-person view aerial device caused a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had resulted in concussion. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I believe I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been lost. We face ongoing detonations.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to fight days before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as doctors placed him on a medical cot, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery struck me. It was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to return to my military group. Our forces has to protect our country,” he said.

Medical staff care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the dorsal area by a piece of mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly 2,000 attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top reaching ground level. It can withstand impacts from 152mm projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the building, intends to erect twenty units in total. A senior official of the nation's national security council and ex- military leader, the official, said they would be “critically important for preserving the survival of our military and assisting troops on the frontline.” The company described the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken after the enemy's invasion.

An example of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, said certain injured personnel had to endure delays many hours or even days before they could be evacuated due to the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill patients who came at 3am. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with severe operations? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies transported the soldier through the passage and into an ambulance. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the two other military members were transferred to the city of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, padded toward the doorway to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”