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Sparse foliage hide the entryway. A sloping wooden passageway leads down to a brightly lit reception area. Inside lies a surgery unit, outfitted with beds, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, medications and neat piles of extra garments. In 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 staff at an subterranean hospital look at a monitor displaying enemy kamikaze and surveillance drones in the area.

Welcome to the nation's covert below-ground medical facility. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country close to the frontline and the urban area of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits 6 metres below the ground. This is the most secure method of delivering care to our injured military personnel. It also ensures medical personnel protected,” said the facility's surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

The stabilisation point treats thirty to forty patients a each day. Cases differ widely. Some have catastrophic limb trauma necessitating surgical removal, or severe stomach wounds. Others can walk. The vast majority are the casualties of enemy FPV aerial devices, which release explosives with lethal precision. “Ninety per cent of our patients are from FPVs. We see few bullet injuries. This is an age of drones and a different kind of conflict,” the doctor explained.

Major Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the subterranean installation for caring for wounded soldiers in the eastern region.

On one day recently, three military members walked with difficulty into the hospital. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old Artem Dvorskyi, said an first-person view drone explosion had ripped a small hole in his leg. “War is terrible. The guy next to me, Vasyl, was fatally wounded,” he stated. “He fell down. Subsequently the Russians dropped a second grenade on him.” He continued: “All structures in the settlement is demolished. There are drones all around and casualties. Our side's and the enemy's.”

The soldier said his squad spent 43 days in a wooded zone close to Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to seize for many months. Sole access to reach their position was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: food and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic assessed his physical condition. After treatment, a nurse gave him fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a pair of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, 28, said a first-person view aerial device ripped a small hole in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, recounted a UAV explosion had resulted in concussion. “My position was in a dugout. It suddenly went dark. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was lucky to remain alive. A relative has been killed. There are ongoing detonations.” A builder working in a neighboring country, Filipchuk noted he had come back to his homeland and enlisted to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s large-scale attack in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been hit in the back. He groaned as medical staff placed him on a medical cot, took off a stained dressing and cleaned his two-day-old shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he used a mobile phone to ring his family member. “A fragment of mortar struck me. The cause was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. After that, to return to my unit. Someone has to defend our country,” he said.

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

Over the past years, Russia has consistently attacked hospitals, health facilities, maternity wards and emergency vehicles. Per human rights groups, over two hundred medical personnel have been killed in almost two thousand assaults. The underground facility is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, soil and granular material placed above up to ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber artillery shells and even three eight-kilogram explosive devices released by aerial means.

A major industrial group, which financed the construction, intends to build twenty facilities in all. A senior official of the nation's security agency and ex- defence minister, the official, said they would be “critically important for saving the lives of our military and supporting troops on the frontline.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and demanding” it had undertaken since Russia’s military offensive.

An example of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, said some wounded personnel had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be transported due to the danger of aerial attacks. “We had two severely injured patients who arrived at the early hours. It was necessary to perform a removal of both limbs on one of them. His tourniquet had been on for such an extended period there was no alternative.” What is his method with severe operations? “I’ve been medicine for two decades. You have to concentrate,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled the soldier through the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. The transport was parked beneath a shrub. The patient and the other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground medical team paused for rest. The hospital’s ginger cat, the mascot, padded up to the entrance to greet the incoming patients. “Our facility operates active 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”