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Sparse trees hide the entrance. A sloping wooden tunnel descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians monitor a display. It shows the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they zigzag in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean hospital look at a monitor showing Russian kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the area.

This is the nation's secret below-ground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in the eastern part of the country 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 protected,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

This medical station treats thirty to forty patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic leg injuries requiring amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which release explosives with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the underground installation for treating injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon last week, a group of three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is terrible. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Then the Russians released a another explosive on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. We see drones everywhere and casualties. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit spent 43 days in a forest area near the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to get to their location was on foot. Necessary provisions arrived by drone: rations and water. A week after he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. Following care, a nurse gave him new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a set of light-colored jeans.

The soldier, 28, stated a FPV aerial device caused a small hole in his lower limb.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a drone blast had left him with a head injury. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been killed. There are ongoing detonations.” A builder employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to go back to my military group. Someone must defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Medical staff treat the wounded soldier, who was hit in the back by a piece of artillery shell.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost 2,000 attacks. The underground facility is built from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and sand laid on top up to the surface. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple 8kg explosive devices released by drone.

A major industrial group, which funded the building, intends to build twenty facilities in total. The head of the nation's security agency and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically essential for preserving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the frontline.” The organization described the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's invasion.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said certain wounded soldiers had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported due to the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who came at 3am. I had to carry out a double amputation on one of them. His bleeding control device had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the other soldiers were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, padded toward the entrance to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”