Wounded Russian servicemen bring alcohol and drugs into a Moscow veterans’ hospital and start fights there. Because of this, they are discharged early

Wounded Russian servicemen bring alcohol and drugs into a Moscow veterans’ hospital and start fights there. Because of this, they are discharged early

March 2025, a Saturday evening. Yevgeny, a 49-year-old taxi driver and veteran of the “special military operation,” a patient at Moscow Veterans Hospital No. 2, pulls out the drawers of his bedside table one by one. In one, there are ten cans of Zolotaya Bochka beer. In another, Stareyshina cognac and Tsarskaya vodka.

“Learn how normal guys relax in the hospital,” he writes in a chat of freight carriers from Moscow and the Moscow region and attaches a video with the bottles.

In the same chat he looks for a foot courier and promises to advertise the courier’s services among soldiers. The rate is 500 rubles for each kilometer of the route from Pyaterochka to the hospital.

As Verstka found out, neither patients nor staff speak of alcohol in the wards as something exceptional. Formally, this is a serious violation of the rules, punishable by discharge. In practice, everything depends on the staff on duty, the soldiers’ personal relationships with nurses and orderlies, and how the patient behaves once drunk.

A serviceman named Oleg, who was previously in this hospital, says that for violations, “both wine and drugs,” “half” of the patients are discharged. At the same time, soldiers who bring psychoactive substances into the hospital cause more problems and irritate not only the staff, but also the patients, more strongly.

Did you have any violations? Verstka asks Oleg from Arkhangelsk region, who spent more than a year at Veterans Hospital No. 2 and calls this hospital “freewheeling.”

I drank whiskey. I tell the duty doctor right away: “Take blood and discharge me. I’m already tired. That’s it.” And I went home.

Read on the Verstka website about everyday life in a hospital where a thousand Russians back from the front are trying to live alongside one another and their new reality (with VPN):

Link not working? Read it here.

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