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Sparse foliage conceal the entrance. A descending wooden tunnel descends to a well-illuminated reception area. There is a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets full of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean hospital look at a monitor displaying enemy kamikaze and surveillance drones in the region.

Welcome to the nation's secret below-ground medical facility. This center began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the city of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters under the ground. It’s the most secure method of providing help to our injured soldiers. It also ensures healthcare workers protected,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station handles 30-40 casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic limb trauma requiring amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can walk. The vast majority are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which release 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 new type of conflict,” the doctor said.

Maj the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for caring for wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

During one afternoon recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had torn a small hole in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Then the Russians dropped a second explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. There are drones all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad spent 43 days in a forest area close to the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. The only way to reach their position was on foot. All supplies came by drone: rations and water. A week following he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a set of light-colored jeans.

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

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a drone blast had left him with concussion. “My position was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he said. “I believe I was lucky to survive. A relative has been killed. We face ongoing explosions.” A builder employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

Another military member, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a medical cot, removed a bloody bandage and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he used a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery hit me. The cause was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a few months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Someone has to defend our country,” he affirmed.

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 consistently attacked hospitals, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. Per international monitors, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, earth and granular material placed above reaching ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from 152mm projectiles and even three 8kg explosive devices dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the construction, intends to erect 20 facilities in total. The head of the nation's security agency and former defence minister, the official, declared they would be “critically essential for saving the lives of our military and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's military offensive.

An example of the facility's surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said certain injured personnel had to endure delays hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of severely injured patients who arrived at the early hours. I had to carry out a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's tourniquet had been on for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe operations? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the passage and into an ambulance. The vehicle was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the two other military members were taken to the city of a major city for additional medical care. The underground medical team took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, walked up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”