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Sparse trees hide the entrance. A sloping timber tunnel descends to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And cabinets full of healthcare supplies, drugs and neat piles of extra garments. Within a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

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

This is Ukraine’s secret underground hospital. This center opened in August and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the urban area of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the ground. This is the most secure way of providing help to our injured soldiers. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 patients a each day. Their conditions vary. Some have catastrophic limb trauma requiring surgical removal, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop explosives with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We see few bullet injuries. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon explained.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean facility for caring for wounded troops in the eastern region.

On one day recently, a group of three military members limped into the hospital. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is destroyed. There are drones all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad endured 43 days in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to get to their position was on foot. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: food and drinking water. A week following he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic assessed his vital signs. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

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

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it became black. I couldn’t feel any feeling or any sound,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been lost. We face continuous explosions.” A builder employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and volunteered to serve days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, removed a stained bandage and treated his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A fragment of mortar hit me. It was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to go back to my military group. Our forces must defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Doctors care for the wounded soldier, who was injured in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly targeted hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. The underground facility is constructed from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and sand placed above up to the surface. It can withstand impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the construction, plans to erect 20 facilities in all. The head of the nation's national security council and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically essential for saving the lives of our armed forces and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The organization referred to the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken since the enemy's military offensive.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, explained some wounded personnel had to wait hours or even 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 3am. It was necessary to perform a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with traumatic surgeries? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean medical team took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, padded up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”