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Scrubby foliage conceal the entrance. A sloping wooden passageway leads down to a brightly lit welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, drugs and organized stacks of extra garments. Within a break area with a laundry appliance and kettle, doctors keep an eye on a screen. It shows the flight patterns of enemy surveillance UAVs as they weave in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean medical center observe a monitor displaying enemy suicide and surveillance drones in the area.

Welcome to Ukraine’s secret below-ground hospital. This center began operations in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in eastern Ukraine close to the frontline and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “We are six meters under the ground. This is the most secure way of providing help to our wounded military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the clinic’s lead doctor, Maj the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 casualties a each day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from devastating leg injuries necessitating amputations, or severe stomach wounds. Some patients can walk. Almost all are the casualties of enemy FPV drones, which drop grenades with deadly precision. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We see minimal bullet injuries. This is an age of drones and a new type of war,” the surgeon said.

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

During one afternoon recently, three military members walked with difficulty into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an FPV explosion had ripped a minor wound in his limb. “War is horrific. My comrade beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He fell down. Subsequently the enemy forces dropped a second grenade on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is destroyed. We see drones all around and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his unit spent 43 days in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their location was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: food and water. Seven days after he was hurt, he traveled 5km (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to a point where an military transport was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. Following care, a nurse provided him with fresh non-military attire: a T-shirt and a set of light-colored denim trousers.

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

A different casualty, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a drone blast had left him with concussion. “My position was in a dugout. Suddenly it went dark. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was fortunate to survive. A relative has been killed. We face continuous detonations.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had returned to his homeland and enlisted to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in February 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff placed him on a medical cot, took off a stained bandage and treated his two-day-old injury from fragments. Covered in a thermal sheet, he used a cellphone to ring his sister. “A piece of artillery struck me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What were his plans now? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to go back to my unit. Someone must protect our country,” he affirmed.

Doctors care for the wounded soldier, who was hit in the back by a piece of artillery shell.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. Per international monitors, 261 health workers have been killed in almost two thousand attacks. The underground facility is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with timber beams, soil and sand laid on top reaching the surface. It can withstand direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which financed the building, intends to build 20 units in total. A senior official of the nation's national security council and ex- military leader, the official, declared they would be “critically important for preserving the survival of our military and assisting defenders on the frontline.” The organization described the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented 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 danger of air assaults. “We had a pair of critically ill casualties who arrived at 3am. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic operations? “I’ve been healthcare for two decades. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk up the passage and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. He and the other soldiers were taken to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's orange feline, the mascot, padded up to the entrance to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”