A former Soviet military facility offers an unlikely respite – before its patients return, too quickly, to the frontline
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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
Imagine 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.
Ksenia Savoskina is a Ukrainian film-maker and the director of No Time to Heal
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