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Scrubby trees hide the entryway. A sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a surgery unit, equipped with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And shelves full of healthcare supplies, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a break area with a washing machine and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a screen. The screen reveals the movements of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Medical staff at an subterranean medical center look at a monitor showing Russian suicide and reconnaissance drones in the region.

This is the nation's secret underground hospital. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are 6 metres under the ground. It’s the most secure method of providing help to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” said the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries requiring surgical removal, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of Russian FPV aerial devices, which drop grenades with lethal precision. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean facility for treating wounded soldiers in the eastern region.

On one afternoon last week, a group of three soldiers limped into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an first-person view drone blast had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians released a another grenade on him.” He added: “All structures in the village is demolished. There are UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit spent over a month in a wooded zone close to Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to get to their position was by walking. All supplies arrived by quadcopter: food and drinking water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medic checked his physical condition. Following care, a nurse gave him fresh civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, said a first-person view aerial device ripped a minor injury in his leg.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it 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. We face ongoing explosions.” A builder employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as doctors placed him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and treated his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to call his sister. “A piece of artillery struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told 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 country,” he said.

Doctors treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the dorsal area by a fragment of artillery shell.

Since 2022, enemy forces has consistently attacked medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, 261 health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. The underground facility is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and granular material laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even three 8kg explosive devices released by drone.

A major industrial group, which funded the building, intends to build 20 facilities in total. The head of the nation's security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “vitally essential for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken after Russia’s invasion.

An example of the facility's surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said some injured personnel had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two severely injured casualties who came at the early hours. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. His bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. One must concentrate,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled the soldier up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were taken to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, walked up to the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”