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Scrubby trees 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. In a break area with a laundry appliance and hot water heater, physicians monitor a display. It shows the flight patterns of Russian surveillance UAVs as they weave in the air above.

Hospital staff at an subterranean medical center look at a monitor displaying enemy kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the region.

This is the nation's covert underground hospital. The facility opened in the eighth month and is the second such installation, located in the eastern part of the country not far from the combat zone and the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk oblast. “Our facility sits six meters below the earth. It’s the safest way of providing help to our injured soldiers. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” said the clinic’s surgeon, Major the chief surgeon.

This medical station treats 30-40 casualties a day. Their conditions vary. Some have catastrophic limb trauma necessitating amputations, or serious abdominal injuries. Others can walk. Almost all are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) drones, which drop explosives with deadly accuracy. “90% of our cases are from first-person view drones. We see minimal gunshot wounds. It’s an age of drones and a different kind of war,” the doctor explained.

Maj Oleksandr Holovashchenko at the underground facility for treating wounded troops in eastern Ukraine.

During one day last week, a group of three soldiers limped into the hospital. The least severely hurt, twenty-eight-year-old one soldier, reported an first-person view drone blast had torn a minor wound in his limb. “War is horrific. The guy next to me, a fellow soldier, was killed,” he stated. “He collapsed. Subsequently the Russians released a another explosive on him.” He continued: “All structures in the village is destroyed. There are UAVs all around and casualties. Our side's and theirs.”

The soldier said his squad spent over a month in a wooded zone close to the city, which enemy forces has been attempting to capture for many months. Sole access to get to their location was by walking. Necessary provisions arrived by quadcopter: rations and drinking water. Seven days after he was hurt, he walked five kilometers (roughly three miles), requiring several hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to evacuate him. At the clinic, a medic assessed his vital signs. Following care, a medical attendant gave him fresh civilian clothes: a shirt and a set of pale denim trousers.

The soldier, twenty-eight, stated a first-person view aerial device caused a small hole in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old Pavlo Filipchuk, said a UAV explosion had left him with concussion. “I was in a dugout. It suddenly went dark. I couldn’t feel any feeling or hear anything,” he explained. “I believe I was fortunate to remain alive. My cousin has been lost. We face ongoing explosions.” A builder working in Lithuania, he said he had come back to Ukraine and volunteered to fight days before the Russian leader's full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Another military member, a serviceman, had been hit in the upper body. He groaned as doctors placed him on a bed, took off a stained dressing and treated his recent shrapnel wound. Covered in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a cellphone to call his sister. “A fragment of mortar hit me. It was a ricochet. I’m OK,” he informed her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a several months. Subsequently, to return to my unit. Our forces must protect our country,” he affirmed.

Doctors treat the wounded soldier, who was injured in the back by a fragment of mortar.

Over the past years, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, maternity wards and ambulances. According to international monitors, over two hundred health workers have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand assaults. The underground facility is constructed from four reinforced shelters, with wooden supports, earth and granular material laid on top up to the surface. It is designed to resist impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple 8kg TNT charges released by aerial means.

The Ukrainian industrial group, which financed the building, plans to build twenty units in total. The head of Ukraine’s security agency and ex- military leader, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “critically important for preserving the survival of our armed forces and supporting defenders on the battlefront.” The organization referred to the initiative as the “most ambitious and challenging” it had implemented since the enemy's military offensive.

An example of the centre’s surgical rooms.

The surgeon, explained certain wounded personnel had to wait many hours or even days before they could be transported due to the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured casualties who came at the early hours. I had to carry out a removal of both limbs on a patient. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for so long there was no alternative.” How did he cope with traumatic operations? “I’ve been medicine for 20 years. You have to focus,” he remarked.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk up the tunnel and into an emergency vehicle. 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 underground medical team took a break. The hospital’s orange feline, the mascot, padded up to the entrance to await the next arrivals. “We are open around the clock,” the surgeon stated. “It doesn’t stop.”