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Scrubby trees hide the entryway. A sloping timber passageway descends to a well-illuminated welcome zone. Inside lies a operating ward, outfitted with beds, heart rate sensors and breathing machines. And cabinets full of healthcare supplies, drugs and neat piles of extra garments. Within a staff room with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians monitor a display. The screen reveals the flight patterns of Russian spy drones as they zigzag in the sky above.

Medical personnel at an subterranean medical center observe a monitor showing enemy suicide and reconnaissance drones in the region.

Welcome to the nation's secret underground medical facility. This center opened in the eighth month and is the second of its kind, situated in the eastern part of the country not far from the combat zone and the urban area of a key location in Donetsk oblast. “We are six meters below the ground. This is the most secure method of providing help to our injured military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Some have catastrophic limb trauma requiring amputations, or severe abdominal injuries. Some patients can walk. Almost all are the victims of Russian FPV drones, which release grenades with lethal precision. “90% of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter minimal gunshot wounds. This is an era of drones and a new type of conflict,” the surgeon explained.

Major the senior surgeon at the underground facility for treating injured soldiers in the eastern region.

On one day recently, 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 minor wound in his limb. “War is horrific. The guy beside me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the Russians released a second explosive on him.” He added: “Everything in the village is demolished. We see UAVs everywhere and casualties. Ours and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his squad endured 43 days in a wooded zone near the city, which enemy forces has been trying to seize since last year. The only way to reach their position was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: rations and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (about 3 miles), taking several hours, to a point where an military transport was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medic checked his physical condition. Following care, a nurse gave him new non-military attire: a T-shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device caused a minor injury in his leg.

Another patient, thirty-eight-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a UAV explosion had resulted in concussion. “My position was in a trench shelter. It suddenly went dark. I lost sensation any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I think I was fortunate to remain alive. A relative has been killed. We face continuous detonations.” A construction worker working in Lithuania, Filipchuk said he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight shortly before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

A third soldier, Taras Mykolaichuk, had been struck in the upper body. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a bed, removed a bloody dressing and treated his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of artillery hit me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To get better. This may require a several months. After that, to go back to my unit. Someone must protect our nation,” he affirmed.

Medical staff care for Taras Mykolaichuk, who was hit in the dorsal area by a fragment of artillery shell.

Over the past years, Russia has repeatedly targeted hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost two thousand attacks. The underground facility is constructed from four steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and sand laid on top up to ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple 8kg TNT charges dropped by drone.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the building, plans to build twenty facilities in all. A senior official of Ukraine’s security agency and former defence minister, the official, said they would be “vitally essential for saving the lives of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The company referred to the project as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had implemented after Russia’s invasion.

An example of the centre’s surgical rooms.

Holovashchenko, said certain injured soldiers had to endure delays many hours or even days before they could be transported because of the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received two critically ill casualties who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to perform a double amputation on one of them. His bleeding control device had been on for so long there was no other option.” What is his method with severe surgeries? “My career in healthcare for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed under a shrub. He and the two other military members were transferred to the city of Dnipro for further treatment. The subterranean medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, padded toward the entrance to await the next arrivals. “We are active around the clock,” Holovashchenko stated. “The work is continuous.”