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Scrubby foliage conceal the entrance. One sloping timber tunnel leads down to a brightly lit reception area. There is a operating ward, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the movements of Russian spy drones as they zigzag in the air above.

Hospital staff at an subterranean hospital look at a monitor showing enemy kamikaze and surveillance drones in the area.

This is Ukraine’s covert below-ground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are 6 metres below the earth. It’s the safest way of providing help to our injured soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” stated the facility's lead doctor, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty casualties a day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic leg injuries requiring amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

Major the senior surgeon at the underground facility for caring for wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon last week, three military members limped into the hospital. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a small hole in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces released a second grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. There are drones everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured 43 days in a wooded zone close to the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: rations and water. A week following he was hurt, he traveled 5km (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse provided him with fresh civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

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 UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I lost sensation anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been lost. We face continuous explosions.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, he noted he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff placed him on a bed, took off a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A fragment of artillery struck me. It was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a few months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Someone must defend our nation,” he said.

Doctors care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently targeted hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, 261 health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand assaults. The underground facility is built from four steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and granular material placed above up to the surface. It can withstand direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells and even three 8kg TNT charges released by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which funded the construction, plans to erect twenty units in total. A senior official of Ukraine’s national security council and former military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the lives of our military and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's invasion.

An example of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, explained certain injured soldiers had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported because of the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of critically ill patients who came at the early hours. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on a patient. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe operations? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. One must concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the two other soldiers were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded toward the entrance to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”