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Scrubby trees hide the entrance. A sloping timber tunnel leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. There is a operating ward, equipped with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of medical equipment, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. In a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, doctors keep an eye on a screen. It shows the movements of enemy spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an underground medical center look at a screen displaying enemy kamikaze and reconnaissance UAVs in the area.

Welcome to the nation's secret underground medical facility. This center opened in August and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine not far from the combat zone and the city of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters under the ground. It’s the most secure method of delivering care to our injured soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the facility's lead doctor, Major the chief surgeon.

This medical station treats 30-40 casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Some have devastating limb trauma requiring amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Others can move on their own. Almost all are the casualties of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop grenades with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter few bullet injuries. It’s an era of drones and a new type of conflict,” the surgeon explained.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for caring for wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one afternoon last week, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The least severely hurt, 28-year-old one soldier, said an FPV blast had torn a minor wound in his leg. “War is terrible. My comrade next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces released a another grenade on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see UAVs all around and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

The soldier said his squad spent over a month in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions came by quadcopter: food and water. A week following he was hurt, he walked 5km (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic assessed his vital signs. After treatment, a medical attendant gave him new civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of light-colored denim trousers.

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

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I lost sensation anything or any sound,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to survive. My cousin has been lost. There are continuous explosions.” A builder employed in Lithuania, he said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to serve days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a bed, removed a bloody bandage and treated his recent injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his sister. “A fragment of mortar struck me. The cause was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to go back to my military group. Our forces has to defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Doctors treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the back by a piece of mortar.

Since 2022, Russia has consistently targeted medical centers, health facilities, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, 261 health workers have been killed in nearly two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand laid on top reaching the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges released by drone.

A major industrial group, which funded the construction, plans to erect twenty facilities in total. A senior official of the nation's security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally essential for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company described the project as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s invasion.

One of the centre’s operating theatres.

The surgeon, said certain wounded personnel had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported because of the threat of air assaults. “We had two critically ill patients who arrived at 3am. It was necessary to perform a double amputation on one of them. His tourniquet had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic surgeries? “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 parked under a shrub. He and the other soldiers were taken to the city of a major city for additional medical care. The subterranean medical team took a break. The facility's orange feline, Vasilevs, walked up to the entrance to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “It doesn’t stop.”