I went to a place deep in the forest where Ukraine’s wounded soldiers go to heal. This is what they told me | Ksenia Savoskina

A former Soviet military facility offers an unlikely respite – before its patients return, too quickly, to the frontline

Ksenia Savoskina directed the Guardian documentary No Time to Heal, which follows the psychological rehabilitation of a Ukrainian soldier after three years in Russian captivity

I

magine a place hidden deep in a pine forest, with small lakes and ponies. Far from the noisy city. In the middle of it there is a modernist Soviet building with marble walls. Walls that have heard so many stories of suffering, loss and death.

This place was built in 1974 as a secret sanatorium for the ministers of Soviet Ukraine. Later it hosted soldiers returning from the 1979-89 Afghan-Soviet war. Then, from 2014, those coming back from the war in eastern Ukraine. And now, soldiers from every part of the Ukrainian front.