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Scrubby trees conceal the entrance. One descending wooden passageway leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus cabinets stocked of healthcare supplies, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the movements of Russian surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical personnel at an underground medical center look at a monitor displaying enemy suicide and surveillance drones in the area.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret below-ground hospital. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are 6 metres under the ground. It’s the safest way of delivering care to our injured military personnel. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop explosives with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. This is an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the surgeon said.

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

On one day recently, 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 limb. “War is horrific. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a second explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is destroyed. There are drones all around and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured over a month in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: food and drinking water. A week following he was injured, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic checked his vital signs. Following care, a nurse provided him with fresh civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a set of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was lucky to survive. A relative has been killed. There are ongoing explosions.” A construction worker employed in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, took off a stained dressing and cleaned his recent injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to call his sister. “A piece of mortar struck me. It was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Our forces has to defend our country,” he affirmed.

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

Since 2022, Russia has repeatedly targeted medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards 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 multiple steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges released by drone.

A major steel and mining company, which funded the building, plans to build 20 facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for preserving the survival of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented since the enemy's military offensive.

An example of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said some wounded personnel had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported because of the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured casualties who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. His tourniquet had been on for so long there was no other option.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “My career in healthcare for two decades. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed beneath a bush. He and the other military members were transferred to the city of a major city for further treatment. The underground medical team took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, walked up to the doorway to await the next arrivals. “We are open around the clock,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”