View of western Bakhmut during the battle, April 5, 2023. Image by Dpsu.gov.ua, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

 Journalist Marfa Khvostova of the online magazine Novaya Vkladka spent a week in the summer volunteering at a military hospital in one of Russia's cities. Global Voices translated, edited for clarity and republished her article with permission from Novaya Vkladka.

In the psychiatric ward, soldiers live for months with diagnoses ranging from schizophrenia to PTSD. None of the dozen patients Marfa Khvostova spoke to wanted to return to the war. Some say they would rather go to prison or die.

‘You always feel like fighting’

The hospital grounds are lush with greenery. Every 20 meters, men sit on benches: some missing a leg, others an arm, some with bandaged heads. A young woman in a beige linen suit struggles to push a wheelchair with a young man who is missing his right leg below the knee and his left leg entirely.

In front of the psychiatric ward, patients smoke. Those without chairs sit on the curb, laying pieces of foam underneath themselves.

The long, bright corridor has dimly lit rooms with curtains drawn. Some patients curl up on beds, facing the wall, while others quietly converse. Most patients spend their days on their phones. They don’t read the news about the war: “It’s all lies.”

Wheelchairs sit beside some beds, and water bottles line the windowsills. Around 80 people are in the psychiatric ward, mostly of lower military ranks and junior officers: sergeants, corporals, lieutenants. Some arrived recently, while others have been there since spring. 

Patients are divided into “enhanced” and “strict” categories. The elderly can walk around the hospital freely, while the strict ones aren’t allowed to be alone to prevent harm to themselves or others. After every visit from relatives, nurses search the patients’ belongings for sharp objects, alcohol, or drugs.

A volunteer’s task is to accompany the “strict” patients to doctor’s appointments. The men undergo military medical evaluations to determine whether they are fit for further service.

The corridor is stuffy, and the patients’ faces are covered in sweat. Many are wearing state-issued striped pyjamas with “Army of Russia” printed on them.

The silence is broken by a tall, slender man named Alexey, wearing a tank top and track pants. He slithers up to me like a snake and looks me directly in the face, his green eyes piercing through me.

I am a perfectly healthy person. But I’m abnormal for society, just as society is abnormal for me. You can inject me right now so I die. Once I’m free, all of humanity will die too.

Alexey wraps a white waffle towel around his neck and pulls it tightly with a sinister smile: “The towel is strooong.” He’s one of the “strict” patients and sometimes really seems unsound. Most of the other patients, though, behave normally, engage in conversation, ask questions, and express curiosity about civilian life. They all take antipsychotic medications. I lead Alexey and a few others to a medical procedure. 

A hospital bed with a young man is rolled into the corridor. His left eye is covered with gauze, and where his right arm should be is a stump. Bandages wrap around his lean, tattooed body. The man tries to clench his hand but can’t — there’s a shard in his left elbow.

The next patient is Ruslan, a tall, broad-shouldered man from the North Caucasus. He was drafted in September 2022 and ended up in the psychiatric ward because he couldn’t sleep anymore. He’s 28 years old.

When asked about their pre-war profession, all the patients immediately list their wartime occupations as if civilian life had never existed. “Senior chemist,” Ruslan responds without hesitation. Chemists, he explains, “decontaminate” mined areas. “But really, I was just going into attacks. Nobody cared who you were or what you did. They said ‘attack,’ and you attacked.”

Ruslan says that after a storming operation, “you always feel like fighting.” Civilian life bores him. 

Better off in prison

Few psychiatric patients want to talk to a priest, but volunteers regularly ask if anyone is interested. “After the meds they give us, all the holiness is beaten out of you,” one man brushes it off, though he still asks the priest to bring him an icon of Saint Nicholas. Another laughs: “We’ve got demons living here.”

Read more: Sanctifying the profane: The Russian Orthodox Church at the front

Andrey, from a small town in the Urals, went to war after a conversation with a priest. Before signing the contract, he went to the church for advice: should he go to war? The priest said, “You have to defend your land, it’s a good cause.” Many clergymen say the same, Andrey notes. If the priest had said that fighting wasn’t right, Andrey might have hesitated. Now, Andrey wears striped hospital pyjamas, moves around on crutches, and hears voices of Ukrainian spies “hiding in the trees.”

Medical records show patients’ military specialities and diagnoses: grenade launcher operator, paranoid schizophrenia, medic, psychopathic schizophrenia. Today, I’m escorting another “strict” patient, Pasha, a 27-year-old from Kyiv, to the urologist. His medical record lists PTSD.

I’m a self-taught radio operator, worked my way up to battalion communications chief. When I turned 18, I went to the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) to fight against the Nazis. We had a power grab, and Nazism started. They desecrated monuments.

Pasha’s relatives live in Kyiv. “My mom and stepfather are with us, but the rest are with the ‘Ukrops’ (a derogatory term for Ukrainians). My father’s a former SBU (Ukrainian Security Service) officer, we don’t talk. He says: ‘Go defend your Putin.’ But I don’t like Putin either. He’s responsible for so many deaths.”

A patient is rolled into the hall in a wheelchair. His leg was recently amputated. Nurses discuss how to take him to the ultrasound: “He’s already had painkillers; he’s barely holding on.” They clumsily transfer the man to a stretcher. His bandaged stump hangs in the air.

“Nothing is stitched up there; they just cut it the f*** off,” the man explains, groaning as he rests his stump on a pillow. “Oh, oh, oh, f***, f***.”

He’s given a bottle of water. Two other patients walk by, holding their urine bags.

Pasha sits, staring at his phone, scrolling through TikTok. He doesn’t read the news: “It’s boring.” In 2019, Pasha ended his military contract, but on February 22, 2022, while living in the DNR, he was drafted. 

During the war, he started having panic attacks — constant anxiety — and he nearly stopped sleeping. He blames his condition on overwork and “constant humiliation from the bosses”:

If there’s any pressure, I start shaking all over, and my brain stops working. I’ve been on pills for three months now — nothing helps. I’m always lying around, depressed. It’s hard to hold a conversation, my brain starts to freeze. It’s hard to focus. I’ve become an idiot. Sometimes I just want to overdose on pills and be done with it.

Pasha’s wife, who lives with their two children in a city in central Russia, tells him to quit. He says, “That’s impossible”:

It’s either prison, or you keep serving. Let them put me in prison! Five years, at least I’ll be alive. And if it’s ten — I’ll hang myself. There’s no way out except suicide. I tried to push those thoughts away, I’d take a pill right away to calm down. Sometimes I get aggressive — that’s the worst. My mind locks on a goal: to kill. And then suddenly, corpses flash before my eyes.

Three nurses were having a tea party, enjoying a homemade cherry pie brought by a patient’s mother. Sipping hot tea, the women explain how everything works in the hospital:

There are such characters here; it's awful. You can buy anything in the hospital: drugs, vodka, even a prostitute. And there are so many holes in the fence! You can’t stop anyone from escaping. You give the guard 500 rubles — go out, get drunk, come back. 

Addicts and alcoholics are given a Category D status at the military medical commission, but some return to their units after the hospital: they help the orderlies and chop wood. They’re not given weapons anymore.

The others get Category B and go back. They sit here for seven or eight months, [finding excuses not to return to the war]: my butt itches, I’ve got a pimple. But no one in this ward loses their mind because of the war. That happens if they take some bad chemicals or if they already have latent schizophrenia. Some stress comes along, and it snaps.

The nurses recall how a 20-year-old conscript patient escaped during the winter:

He stepped outside for a smoke and said, ‘That’s it, guys, I’m going home,’ and just bolted across the ice!  Yeah, in summer sneakers, over the fence. He had already called a taxi, and it was waiting for him.

According to the nurses, the man went home, started doing drugs, and three months later hanged himself in a barn. His mother later came to the hospital to collect his things and passport.

The nurses fall silent, finishing the pie. One of them, setting her cup aside, looks me in the eyes: “There are no normal ones here — the normal ones didn’t go to war.”