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Sparse foliage hide the entryway. A descending timber passageway leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets full of healthcare supplies, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

Medical personnel at an underground hospital observe a monitor showing Russian kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the region.

This is Ukraine’s covert below-ground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, situated in the eastern part of the country not far from the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters under the ground. It’s the most secure method of delivering care to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Maj the chief surgeon.

This medical station treats 30-40 casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic limb trauma necessitating amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. Almost all are the victims of Russian first-person view (FPV) drones, which release grenades with deadly precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We see few bullet injuries. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of war,” the surgeon said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for treating wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon last week, three soldiers limped into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had torn a small hole in his limb. “War is horrific. My comrade next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces released a second explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is demolished. There are drones all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier explained his unit endured 43 days in a forest area near the city, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to get to their position was on foot. All supplies came by quadcopter: rations and water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant provided him with new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

The soldier, 28, said a first-person view drone ripped a small hole in his lower limb.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had resulted in concussion. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to survive. My cousin has been killed. We face ongoing explosions.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had returned to his homeland and volunteered to serve shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a bed, took off a stained dressing and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his sister. “A piece of mortar struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Someone must protect our country,” he said.

Doctors treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the dorsal area by a piece of mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked hospitals, health facilities, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and sand placed above reaching the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even three 8kg explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

A major steel and mining company, which financed the building, intends to erect 20 facilities in total. The head of the nation's security agency and former defence minister, the official, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the survival of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The company described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, explained certain wounded 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 critically ill casualties who came at the early hours. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “My career in medicine for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Orderlies transported the soldier up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was parked beneath a bush. The patient and the other military members were taken to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean medical team took a break. The facility's ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded toward the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”