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Sparse foliage hide the entrance. One sloping timber passageway leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, cardiac monitors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of extra garments. Within a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors keep an eye on a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Hospital personnel at an underground hospital observe a screen displaying Russian kamikaze and surveillance drones in the area.

Welcome to Ukraine’s covert below-ground hospital. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the city of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres under the earth. It’s the safest method of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” stated the clinic’s surgeon, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats 30-40 patients a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. This is an era of drones and a different kind of war,” the doctor explained.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for treating wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon last week, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is terrible. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a another grenade on him.” He added: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are UAVs all around and casualties. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit spent over a month in a forest area close to the city, which Russia has been attempting to capture since last year. The only way to reach their location was by walking. All supplies came by drone: rations and water. Seven days following he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant gave him new civilian clothes: a T-shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

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

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a drone blast had left him with a head injury. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was lucky to survive. A relative has been killed. There are ongoing detonations.” A construction worker working in a neighboring country, he said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, 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. Covered in a foil blanket, he borrowed a cellphone to ring his sister. “A fragment of mortar hit me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to return to my military group. Someone has to defend our country,” he said.

Doctors treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the dorsal area by a piece of artillery shell.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly targeted hospitals, health facilities, obstetric units and ambulances. According to international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from four steel bunkers, with timber beams, earth and granular material placed above up to the surface. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm projectiles and even three 8kg TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which funded the building, plans to erect 20 units in total. The head of Ukraine’s national security council and ex- military leader, the official, said they would be “vitally important for saving the lives of our armed forces and assisting troops on the frontline.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's invasion.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said certain wounded soldiers had to wait hours or even days before they could be evacuated because of the danger of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to perform a double amputation on one of them. His bleeding control device had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “My career in medicine for two decades. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies transported the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The vehicle was parked under a bush. He and the other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded up to the doorway to greet the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”