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Scrubby trees hide the entrance. One sloping wooden tunnel descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And shelves full of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the movements of enemy spy drones as they weave in the air above.

Hospital personnel at an underground medical center look at a monitor showing enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret underground medical facility. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the ground. This is the safest way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” stated the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles thirty to forty patients a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an era of unmanned aircraft and a new type of war,” the surgeon said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean installation for treating wounded troops in eastern Ukraine.

During one afternoon recently, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had torn a small hole in his limb. “Conflict is horrific. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces dropped a another grenade on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs everywhere and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his squad spent 43 days in a forest area close to the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their location was by walking. All supplies came by drone: food and drinking water. A week following he was hurt, he traveled 5km (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his vital signs. Following care, a nurse provided him with new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

The soldier, 28, stated a FPV aerial device ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation any feeling or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been killed. There are ongoing explosions.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to serve days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, removed a bloody bandage and cleaned his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to ring his family member. “A piece of artillery hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to return 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 mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in nearly 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and sand placed above reaching ground level. It can withstand direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which funded the construction, plans to erect twenty facilities in all. A senior official of the nation's security agency and former defence minister, the official, declared they would be “vitally essential for saving the survival of our military and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

An example of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said some wounded soldiers had to wait hours or even days before they could be transported because of the threat of aerial attacks. “We had two critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe operations? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. One must focus,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed beneath a shrub. The patient and the other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, padded up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”