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Sparse foliage hide the entryway. A sloping wooden passageway leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a operating ward, equipped with gurneys, cardiac monitors and ventilators. Plus shelves stocked of medical equipment, medications and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a break area with a washing machine and kettle, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

Hospital personnel at an underground hospital observe a monitor showing enemy suicide and surveillance drones in the area.

This is Ukraine’s secret below-ground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in the eastern part of the country not far from the frontline and the urban area of a key location in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters under the ground. This is the most secure way of delivering care to our injured military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats 30-40 patients a day. Their conditions vary. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic limb trauma requiring surgical removal, or severe abdominal injuries. Some patients can walk. The vast majority are the victims of Russian FPV aerial devices, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “90% of our cases are from FPVs. We encounter minimal bullet injuries. This is an age of drones and a new type of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Maj the senior surgeon at the subterranean installation for treating wounded soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

On one day last week, three soldiers limped into the facility. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, reported an FPV blast had torn a small hole in his leg. “Conflict is terrible. The guy beside me, Vasyl, was killed,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the enemy forces dropped a second explosive on him.” He continued: “All structures in the village is demolished. We see UAVs everywhere and bodies. Ours and theirs.”

Dvorskyi said his squad spent 43 days in a wooded zone near the city, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to reach their position was by walking. All supplies came by quadcopter: food and drinking water. A week after he was injured, he traveled five kilometers (about 3 miles), requiring several hours, to a point where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. At the clinic, a medic checked his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse provided him with new civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of pale denim trousers.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a FPV drone ripped a small hole in his leg.

A different casualty, thirty-eight-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “I was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he said. “I think I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been lost. There are ongoing explosions.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had returned to Ukraine and enlisted to serve shortly before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He expressed pain as medical staff laid him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and cleaned his two-day-old injury from fragments. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his sister. “A piece of artillery hit me. The cause was a ricochet. My condition is stable,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To recover. This may require a several months. Subsequently, to go back to my unit. Our forces has to defend our nation,” he said.

Medical staff treat Taras Mykolaichuk, who was injured in the back by a piece of mortar.

Since 2022, enemy forces has consistently attacked medical centers, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred health workers have been killed in almost 2,000 assaults. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and granular material placed above reaching the surface. It is designed to resist direct hits from 152mm artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram TNT charges dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to build 20 units in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and former defence minister, the official, declared they would be “vitally important for preserving the lives of our armed forces and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The organization described the project as the “largest-scale and challenging” it had implemented after the enemy's invasion.

One of the facility's surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said certain injured personnel 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 patients who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to carry out a removal of both limbs on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no alternative.” What is his method with traumatic surgeries? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. One must focus,” he said.

Medical assistants wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was stationed under a shrub. The patient and the other soldiers were taken to the city of a major city for additional medical care. The underground medical team paused for rest. The facility's ginger cat, the mascot, walked toward the doorway to await the incoming patients. “Our facility operates open around the clock,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”