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Scrubby trees hide the entrance. A descending timber passageway leads down to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital staff at an underground medical center observe a screen displaying Russian kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the region.

This is Ukraine’s secret underground medical facility. The facility opened in August and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the urban area of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the ground. It’s the safest way of providing help to our injured military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles thirty to forty casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which drop grenades with lethal precision. “90% of our patients are from first-person view drones. We see few gunshot wounds. This is an era of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon said.

Major the senior surgeon at the underground facility for treating injured soldiers in the eastern region.

During one afternoon last week, a group of three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is horrific. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Then the Russians released a another explosive on him.” He continued: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are drones all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad endured 43 days in a forest area near the city, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. Sole access to reach their position was on foot. All supplies arrived by drone: rations and water. Seven days following he was hurt, he traveled 5km (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medic checked his vital signs. Following care, a nurse gave him fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

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

Another patient, 38-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 lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been killed. We face continuous detonations.” A builder employed in Lithuania, he said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before the Russian leader's large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, removed a stained dressing and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a mobile phone to ring his sister. “A piece of mortar struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a few months. Subsequently, to return to my military group. Someone has to defend our nation,” he said.

Medical staff treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has consistently targeted hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. Per international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been killed in nearly two thousand assaults. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, soil and granular material placed above up to ground level. It is designed to resist direct hits from large-caliber artillery shells and even three 8kg explosive devices dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the building, plans to build 20 units in total. A senior official of the nation's security agency and ex- defence minister, the official, declared they would be “vitally important for saving the lives of our military and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The organization described the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented since the enemy's military offensive.

An example of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, said certain wounded soldiers had to wait many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported because of the danger of air assaults. “We had two critically ill patients who arrived at the early hours. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no other option.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “My career in medicine for two decades. You have to focus,” he said.

Medical assistants transported the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked under a shrub. He and the other soldiers were transferred to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, walked toward the entrance to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active around the clock,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”