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Sparse trees hide the entrance. One sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus cabinets stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. Within a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical staff at an subterranean medical center observe a screen displaying enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the area.

Welcome to the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. The facility opened in August and is the second of its kind, located in the eastern part of the country close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters below the earth. It’s the safest way of providing help to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” stated the facility's lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Some have devastating leg injuries necessitating surgical removal, or serious abdominal injuries. Others can walk. Almost all are the victims of enemy FPV drones, which drop grenades with lethal accuracy. “90% of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. This is an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon said.

Major the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for treating injured soldiers in the eastern region.

On one afternoon recently, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “War is horrific. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Then the enemy forces released a second explosive on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs all around and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured over a month in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to get to their position was by walking. All supplies came by drone: food and water. Seven days after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his vital signs. Following care, a nurse provided him with fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

The soldier, 28, stated a FPV drone caused a small hole in his leg.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, 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 any sound,” he explained. “I believe I was lucky to survive. A relative has been killed. We face ongoing explosions.” A construction worker employed in a neighboring country, he said he had returned to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors laid him on a bed, took off a stained bandage and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to call his sister. “A piece of artillery struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. That will take a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces must defend our nation,” he said.

Doctors treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the dorsal area by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, Russia has consistently targeted medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and sand laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by drone.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to erect twenty facilities in all. A senior official of the nation's security agency and former military leader, the official, said they would be “vitally important for preserving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented after Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, explained certain injured soldiers had to wait hours or even days before they could be evacuated due to the danger of air assaults. “We had a pair of severely injured casualties who came at the early hours. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. The soldier's tourniquet had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. One must concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier through the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the other soldiers were taken to the city of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked up to the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are open around the clock,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”