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Sparse foliage hide the entrance. One sloping wooden tunnel leads down to a well-illuminated reception area. There is a operating ward, equipped with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. In a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors keep an eye on a display. It shows the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an underground medical center look at a monitor displaying enemy suicide and surveillance UAVs in the area.

Welcome to the nation's secret underground hospital. This center opened in August and is the second of its kind, situated in the eastern part of the country not far from the frontline and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “Our facility sits six meters under the earth. This is the safest way of providing help to our injured military personnel. And it keeps medical personnel safe,” said the facility's lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can walk. Almost all are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an era of drones and a new type of conflict,” the surgeon said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground installation for treating wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon last week, a group of three military members limped into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had torn a minor wound in his limb. “Conflict is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces dropped a second grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs everywhere and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his squad endured 43 days in a wooded zone close to the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. Sole access to reach their position was on foot. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: food and water. A week following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to where an military transport was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device ripped a small hole in his lower limb.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in concussion. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing detonations.” A builder employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had returned to his homeland and enlisted to serve days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been hit in the back. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of mortar struck me. The cause was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a several months. After that, to return to my military group. Our forces must defend our nation,” he said.

Medical staff treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the dorsal area by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, Russia has consistently attacked hospitals, health facilities, obstetric units and ambulances. According to human rights groups, 261 medical personnel have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and sand laid on top up to the surface. It can withstand impacts from 152mm projectiles and even three 8kg explosive devices dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which funded the construction, plans to build twenty facilities in total. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and former military leader, the official, said they would be “vitally important for saving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The company described the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken after Russia’s military offensive.

An example of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, said certain injured personnel had to wait hours or even multiple 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 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 alternative.” What is his method with severe operations? “My career in medicine for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants transported the soldier up the passage and into an ambulance. The vehicle was parked beneath a shrub. He and the two other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, padded toward the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are open around the clock,” Holovashchenko said. “The work is continuous.”