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Scrubby trees hide the entryway. A sloping wooden passageway leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with gurneys, heart rate sensors and ventilators. And shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians keep an eye on a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean medical center observe a screen displaying Russian suicide and surveillance UAVs in the region.

Welcome to the nation's covert underground medical facility. This center began operations in August and is the second of its kind, located in the eastern part of the country not far from the combat zone and the urban area of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits six meters under the ground. It’s the safest way of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” stated the facility's lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles 30-40 patients a day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma necessitating amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which release explosives 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 unmanned aircraft and a new type of conflict,” the surgeon explained.

Major the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for caring for injured troops in eastern Ukraine.

During one day recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV blast had torn a small hole in his leg. “Conflict is horrific. My comrade next to me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces released a another explosive on him.” He continued: “All structures in the village is demolished. There are drones everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

Dvorskyi said his unit endured over a month in a wooded zone close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to reach their position was by walking. All supplies came by drone: food and water. Seven days after he was injured, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his vital signs. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a FPV aerial device ripped a small hole in his leg.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel anything or any sound,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. We face ongoing detonations.” A construction worker employed in Lithuania, he noted he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to serve shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the back. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, took off a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to call his family member. “A fragment of artillery struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my military group. Our forces must defend our nation,” he said.

Medical staff care for the wounded soldier, who was injured in the dorsal area by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. Per international monitors, 261 health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and sand laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand impacts from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges released by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the building, plans to build twenty facilities in all. A senior official of the nation's national security council and ex- military leader, the official, declared they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The company described the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken after the enemy's invasion.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

The surgeon, explained some injured personnel had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported because of the danger of aerial attacks. “We had two critically ill patients who came at 3am. It was necessary to perform a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no other option.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “My career in healthcare for two decades. One must concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants transported the soldier up the passage and into an ambulance. The transport was stationed under a shrub. He and the other military members were taken to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground medical team took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, Vasilevs, walked toward the doorway to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”