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Scrubby trees hide the entryway. One sloping timber passageway descends to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors monitor a display. It shows the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they zigzag in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean medical center observe a screen showing enemy suicide and reconnaissance drones in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret underground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, situated in the eastern part of the country close to the combat zone and the city of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “We are six meters under the earth. It’s the most secure method of delivering care to our injured soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have devastating limb trauma requiring amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Others can walk. Almost all are the casualties of enemy FPV drones, which release grenades with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see few gunshot wounds. This is an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

Major the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for caring for wounded soldiers in the eastern region.

On one day last week, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV explosion had ripped a small hole in his limb. “War is terrible. My comrade beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Then the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit spent 43 days in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to get to their position was by walking. All supplies arrived by quadcopter: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), taking 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 gave him fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, stated a first-person view drone caused a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a drone blast had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation anything or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been killed. We face ongoing detonations.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff placed him on a bed, took off a stained bandage and treated his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his family member. “A piece of mortar hit me. It was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a several months. After that, to go back to my unit. Someone must protect our country,” he affirmed.

Medical staff treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, Russia has consistently targeted hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, 261 health workers have been fatally attacked in almost 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is built from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and sand laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the building, intends to erect twenty facilities in all. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and former military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally important for saving the survival of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization described the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had undertaken after the enemy's military offensive.

An example of the centre’s operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, said some wounded personnel had to wait hours or even days before they could be evacuated because of the danger of air assaults. “We had a pair of critically ill patients who came at the early hours. It was necessary to carry out a double amputation on a patient. His tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. One must concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed beneath a bush. He and the two other military members were transferred to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's orange feline, Vasilevs, padded up to the entrance to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”