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Scrubby trees hide the entrance. One descending timber tunnel leads down to a well-illuminated reception area. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets stocked of medical equipment, medications and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors monitor a display. It shows the movements of enemy surveillance UAVs as they zigzag in the air above.

Medical staff at an underground medical center look at a screen displaying Russian kamikaze and surveillance drones in the area.

This is the nation's covert underground hospital. This center began operations in August and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine not far from the frontline and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the ground. This is the safest way of delivering care to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel safe,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating limb trauma requiring amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Others can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which release grenades with lethal accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. This is an age of unmanned aircraft and a different kind of war,” the doctor said.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for caring for injured troops in the eastern region.

During one afternoon recently, three military members limped into the hospital. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an first-person view drone blast had torn a minor wound in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians released a another grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is demolished. We see drones everywhere and casualties. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his unit spent over a month in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their position was by walking. All supplies arrived by drone: food and drinking water. A week following he was injured, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), taking several hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. Upon arrival, a medic assessed his physical condition. Following care, a nurse provided him with new civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of light-colored jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, said 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 drone blast had resulted in a head injury. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly became black. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing detonations.” A builder employed in a neighboring country, Filipchuk said he had come back to his homeland and volunteered to serve shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a medical cot, removed a stained dressing and cleaned his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his sister. “A piece of artillery hit me. The cause was a deflected projectile. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To recover. That will take a several months. After that, to return to my military group. Our forces has to protect our country,” he affirmed.

Medical staff care for the wounded soldier, who was hit in the dorsal area by a piece of mortar.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and ambulances. According to human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in nearly 2,000 assaults. The underground facility is built from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and granular material laid on top up to the surface. It can withstand direct hits from large-caliber projectiles and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges released by drone.

A major industrial group, which financed the construction, intends to erect twenty units in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “critically important for preserving the survival of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

One of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said certain wounded personnel had to endure delays many hours or even days before they could be transported because of the threat of aerial attacks. “We had a pair of critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. I had 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 other option.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “My career in medicine for 20 years. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Medical assistants transported Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an ambulance. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. He and the other soldiers were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for additional medical care. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, Vasilevs, padded up to the doorway to await the next arrivals. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” the surgeon said. “It doesn’t stop.”