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Sparse trees conceal the entrance. A sloping timber passageway descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of extra garments. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors monitor a display. The screen reveals the movements of Russian surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean hospital observe a screen displaying enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance drones in the area.

This is Ukraine’s secret below-ground hospital. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in the eastern part of the country close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are 6 metres below the earth. This is the safest method of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 patients a day. Their conditions vary. Some have devastating limb trauma requiring surgical removal, or severe stomach wounds. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of enemy FPV drones, which drop grenades with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. It’s an age of drones and a new type of war,” the surgeon said.

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

During one afternoon last week, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an first-person view drone explosion had torn a minor wound in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He collapsed. Subsequently the enemy forces dropped a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. We see drones everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad endured over a month in a forest area close to Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. The only way to get to their position was on foot. All supplies arrived by drone: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), taking three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant gave him fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, said a first-person view aerial device caused a minor injury in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-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 couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. There are continuous detonations.” A builder working in a neighboring country, he said he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to serve days before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been struck in the back. 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 cellphone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery hit me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he told her. What were his plans now? “To get better. This may require a few months. After that, to go back to my military group. Someone must defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Medical staff care for the wounded soldier, who was hit in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly attacked medical centers, health facilities, obstetric units and ambulances. According to human rights groups, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, soil and sand placed above up to the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the building, plans to erect twenty facilities in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- military leader, the official, declared they would be “vitally essential for saving the survival of our military and supporting defenders on the frontline.” The organization described the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

One of the facility's operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, explained certain wounded soldiers had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported due to the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured casualties who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on a patient. His bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “My career in medicine for 20 years. One must focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was stationed under a shrub. The patient and the two other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, walked toward the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”