Hi, this is Anya Ryzhkova. Friends and family often ask me: “What are you writing about these days?...”

Hi, this is Anya Ryzhkova. Friends and family often ask me: “What are you writing about these days?” Over the past month I’ve felt awkward answering that question.

Writing about what lies in the bedside table of a patient in a military hospital? What exactly a soldier asks to have rolled into a cigarette and then passed through the checkpoint “without drawing attention”? What voice messages an orderly sends to friends when she gets home after a 24-hour shift?

But that is exactly what has been occupying my mind. We found out that wounded Russian soldiers leave hospitals not only when their rehabilitation is nearing its end, but also prematurely for “violating the rules.” “Discharge and back to the unit” is the route for those who are not yet healed and who drank, used drugs right in the hospital, or started a fight in the ward or the corridor. That route, as you may have guessed, sometimes leads back to the war.

I spoke with soldiers who have been moving from hospital to hospital for months and years, and tried to get comments from staff. And I also spent hours in Telegram chats where both groups felt freer and shared the day-to-day life of the hospital: they boasted, postured, complained, in short, told “amazing” things. (Here I again want to recall the orderly’s voice messages, but you’ll find them in the text.)

While working on the piece, I worried that readers would click the link only for the episodes involving, условно говоря, discharge over whiskey. But this text is an attempt to show a space where a thousand military men are trying to live alongside one another and come to terms with their new lives: with amputated limbs, the search for work, rethinking everything they saw at the front, and answers to the question “what for?”

And what do you think — what for?

Read about what is happening in Veterans Hospital No. 2 on the Verstka website (with VPN):

Link not working? Read here.

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Verstka

“Learn how the regular lads relax in the hospital”: how wounded veterans of the SMO leave rehabilitation because of alcohol, drugs, and fights

Military personnel are discharged early for “violating the rules”