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Scrubby foliage conceal the entrance. A descending wooden tunnel descends to a well-illuminated reception area. There is a surgery unit, equipped with gurneys, cardiac monitors and breathing machines. And shelves stocked of healthcare supplies, drugs and neat piles of spare clothes. Within a staff room with a washing machine and hot water heater, doctors monitor a display. It shows the movements of Russian spy drones as they weave in the sky above.

Hospital personnel at an underground hospital look at a screen showing enemy kamikaze and surveillance UAVs in the region.

Welcome to Ukraine’s covert underground hospital. The facility began operations in August and is the second of its kind, situated in eastern Ukraine close to the combat zone and the urban area of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. “We are six meters under the earth. It’s the safest method of delivering care to our wounded soldiers. And it keeps healthcare workers safe,” stated the facility's surgeon, Maj the chief surgeon.

This medical station handles thirty to forty casualties a each day. Cases differ widely. Certain individuals suffer from catastrophic leg injuries requiring amputations, or serious stomach wounds. Some patients can move on their own. Almost all are the victims of enemy first-person view (FPV) aerial devices, which drop explosives with lethal precision. “90% of our patients are from first-person view drones. We encounter few bullet injuries. This is an era of drones and a new type of war,” the doctor explained.

Maj the senior surgeon at the underground installation for caring for injured soldiers in eastern Ukraine.

During one day recently, a group of three soldiers walked with difficulty into the facility. The most lightly injured, 28-year-old one soldier, said an first-person view drone explosion had torn a minor wound in his leg. “War is horrific. My comrade next to me, a fellow soldier, was fatally wounded,” he said. “He collapsed. Then the Russians dropped a another explosive on him.” He continued: “Everything in the settlement is destroyed. There are drones all around and bodies. Our side's and theirs.”

Dvorskyi explained his unit endured over a month in a wooded zone near Pokrovsk, which Russia has been attempting to capture for many months. The only way to reach their position was by walking. All supplies came by drone: rations and drinking water. A week after he was hurt, he traveled five kilometers (roughly three miles), taking three hours, to where an armoured vehicle was able to pick him up. Upon arrival, a medic assessed his physical condition. Following care, a medical attendant gave him fresh non-military attire: a shirt and a set of pale jeans.

Artem Dvorskiy, twenty-eight, said a FPV drone ripped a small hole in his lower limb.

Another patient, 38-year-old a serviceman, said a UAV explosion had left him with a head injury. “I was in a dugout. Suddenly it became black. I couldn’t feel anything or hear anything,” he said. “I believe I was lucky to survive. A relative has been killed. We face continuous detonations.” A construction worker employed in Lithuania, he said he had come back to Ukraine and enlisted to fight days before Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in early 2022.

A third soldier, a serviceman, had been struck in the back. He groaned as medical staff laid him on a bed, took off a bloody dressing and cleaned his recent shrapnel wound. Wrapped in a thermal sheet, he borrowed a mobile phone to call his family member. “A piece of artillery hit me. It was a deflected projectile. My condition is stable,” he told her. What comes next for him? “To get better. That will take a few months. After that, to go back to my unit. Someone has to defend our nation,” he affirmed.

Medical staff treat the wounded soldier, who was hit in the back by a piece of artillery shell.

Since 2022, enemy forces has repeatedly attacked medical centers, clinics, obstetric units and emergency vehicles. According to human rights groups, 261 medical personnel have been fatally attacked in almost two thousand attacks. This subterranean hospital is built from multiple steel bunkers, with wooden supports, earth and granular material laid on top reaching ground level. It can withstand impacts from large-caliber projectiles and even multiple eight-kilogram explosive devices dropped by aerial means.

The Ukrainian steel and mining company, which financed the construction, intends to erect twenty units in all. The head of the nation's national security council and former defence minister, Rustem Umerov, said they would be “vitally essential for saving the lives of our military and assisting troops on the battlefront.” The organization described the project as the “largest-scale and demanding” it had implemented since the enemy's military offensive.

One of the facility's operating theatres.

The surgeon, explained certain wounded personnel had to wait hours or even multiple days before they could be evacuated due to the threat of aerial attacks. “Our facility received a pair of severely injured patients who came at 3am. It was necessary to perform a double amputation on one of them. The soldier's bleeding control device had been applied for such an extended period there was no other option.” What is his method with severe operations? “I’ve been healthcare for 20 years. You have to focus,” he said.

Orderlies wheeled Mykolaichuk through the tunnel and into an ambulance. The vehicle was stationed beneath a shrub. He and the other military members were taken to the urban center of Dnipro for further treatment. The underground hospital staff paused for rest. The facility's ginger cat, Vasilevs, padded up to the entrance to await the incoming patients. “We are open 24 hours a day,” Holovashchenko said. “It doesn’t stop.”