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Scrubby trees conceal the entrance. One descending timber passageway descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. There is a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. Plus cabinets full of medical equipment, drugs and organized stacks of spare clothes. In a staff room with a washing machine and kettle, physicians monitor a screen. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they zigzag in the sky above.

Hospital staff at an subterranean hospital observe a monitor showing enemy kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the area.

This is the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. This center began operations in August and is the second of its kind, located in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are 6 metres below the earth. This is the most secure way of providing help to our wounded soldiers. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

This medical station treats 30-40 patients a day. Their conditions vary. Some have devastating limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV drones, which drop explosives with deadly accuracy. “Ninety per cent of our cases are from FPVs. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor said.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean installation for caring for wounded troops in eastern Ukraine.

During one day last week, a group of three military members limped into the facility. The most lightly injured, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone explosion had torn a small hole in his limb. “War is horrific. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He fell down. Then the Russians released a another explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. We see drones all around and bodies. Our side's and the enemy's.”

The soldier explained his unit spent 43 days in a wooded zone close to the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to reach their position was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: food and water. A week after he was hurt, he walked 5km (roughly three miles), taking several hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medical staff checked his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse provided him with new non-military attire: a shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

The soldier, twenty-eight, said a FPV drone ripped a minor injury in his leg.

A different casualty, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “I was in a trench shelter. Suddenly it became black. I lost sensation anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was lucky to survive. My cousin has been killed. We face continuous detonations.” A builder working in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight 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 expressed pain as doctors laid him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his sister. “A piece of mortar hit me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to return to my unit. Our forces must defend our country,” he said.

Doctors treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the dorsal area by a piece of artillery shell.

Over the past years, enemy forces has consistently attacked hospitals, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been fatally attacked in nearly 2,000 attacks. The underground facility is constructed from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and granular material laid on top up to ground level. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the building, plans to erect 20 units in total. The head of the nation's national security council and ex- defence minister, Rustem Umerov, declared they would be “vitally essential for saving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had undertaken after Russia’s invasion.

One of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, said some wounded personnel had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the threat of air assaults. “We had two critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. I had to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. His bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no other option.” How did he cope with severe surgeries? “My career in healthcare for 20 years. You have to concentrate,” he remarked.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the other soldiers were transferred to the urban center of a major city for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff took a break. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, walked up to the doorway to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “The work is continuous.”