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Sparse trees hide the entrance. One descending wooden passageway descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. Plus shelves full of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors monitor a screen. It shows the flight patterns of enemy spy drones as they zigzag in the air above.

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

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret below-ground medical facility. This center opened in August and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country close to the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “We are six meters below the earth. This is the most secure way of delivering care to our injured soldiers. It also ensures healthcare workers safe,” stated the facility's lead doctor, Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point handles 30-40 casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Some have catastrophic limb trauma necessitating amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which release grenades with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see minimal bullet injuries. This is an era of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Major the senior surgeon at the subterranean facility for caring for injured soldiers in the eastern region.

On one day last week, three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, said an FPV explosion had ripped a minor wound in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was killed,” he said. “He collapsed. Subsequently the enemy forces released a another grenade on him.” He continued: “All structures in the village is demolished. We see drones all around and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

The soldier said his squad spent 43 days in a wooded zone close to the city, which Russia has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to get to their location was on foot. All supplies arrived by quadcopter: rations and water. Seven days after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medical staff assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse gave him new civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale jeans.

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

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it became black. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. We face continuous explosions.” A construction worker employed in Lithuania, Filipchuk noted he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as doctors laid him on a medical cot, removed a stained dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a foil blanket, he used a cellphone to call 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 recover. That will take a several months. After that, to return to my military group. Our forces must defend our nation,” he said.

Doctors care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a piece of mortar.

Since 2022, Russia has consistently attacked medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. Per international monitors, 261 health workers have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand laid on top up to the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram TNT charges released by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the construction, plans to erect twenty units in all. A senior official of the nation's national security council and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally essential for saving the survival of our military and assisting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented since Russia’s invasion.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, explained certain wounded soldiers had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who came at the early hours. It was necessary to perform a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no alternative.” How did he cope with severe operations? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Medical assistants transported Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was parked under a shrub. He and the two other military members were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The facility's orange feline, Vasilevs, padded toward the entrance to greet the incoming patients. “We are open around the clock,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”