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Sparse foliage conceal the entryway. One descending wooden passageway leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And cabinets stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and kettle, physicians keep an eye on a display. The screen reveals the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an subterranean hospital look at a screen displaying enemy kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the region.

Welcome to the nation's covert underground medical facility. The facility began operations in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters below the ground. It’s the safest method of providing help to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures healthcare workers safe,” stated the facility's surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the casualties of Russian first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “90% of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. It’s an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the surgeon said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for treating wounded troops in eastern Ukraine.

During one day recently, three military members 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. My comrade next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the Russians released a second explosive on him.” He continued: “Everything in the village is demolished. We see drones all around and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his unit spent 43 days in a forest area near Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their location was by walking. Necessary provisions came by drone: rations and drinking water. Seven days following he was injured, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medical staff checked his physical condition. Following care, a nurse gave him new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

The soldier, 28, stated a first-person view aerial device ripped a minor injury in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in concussion. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I couldn’t feel anything or any sound,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to survive. A relative has been lost. We face ongoing detonations.” A builder working in a neighboring country, he said he had returned to his homeland and volunteered to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as doctors placed him on a medical cot, removed a bloody bandage and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to ring his sister. “A piece of artillery hit me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Someone has to protect our country,” he said.

Doctors care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the dorsal area by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, Russia has consistently attacked hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. The underground facility is built from four steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and sand laid on top reaching the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices released by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the construction, intends to erect 20 units in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- defence minister, the official, declared they would be “vitally important for saving the lives of our military and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

One of the facility's operating theatres.

Holovashchenko, explained some injured soldiers had to endure delays many hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “We had two severely injured casualties who arrived at 3am. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Medical assistants transported the soldier up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the two other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, walked toward the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”