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Wounded Russian Soldiers Overwhelm Civilian Hospitals as Beds Run Out
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Russian military hospitals can no longer absorb the flow of wounded soldiers from the war against Ukraine, forcing the Defense Ministry to take over civilian medical facilities and move troops into ordinary hospitals across several regions.
This was reported by Novaya Gazeta Europe on May 19.
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In late 2025, authorities in Omsk shut down a women's consultation clinic, converted the building into a polyclinic, and transferred it to the Defense Ministry. The city had previously closed Maternity Hospital No. 5 and opened a military hospital in its place.
A new clinical, medical and surgical center is now being built in the region, with what officials described as "special attention" devoted to participants in the invasion of Ukraine.
Local residents complain that ordinary patients are increasingly having difficulty securing treatment. One Omsk woman recounted that her mother, recovering from serious operations, was refused hospitalization with the words: “No beds. The SVO guys… You understand.”
A similar pattern is visible elsewhere. In Moscow, the city's only hospital for patients with cystic fibrosis was repurposed into a military facility, while in Rostov-on-Don, a maternity hospital was repurposed the same way.
Even with new construction and the seizure of existing institutions, beds in Defense Ministry hospitals remain in short supply.
Wounded servicemen are now being placed in standard civilian hospitals, either isolated in dedicated wards or housed in general rooms alongside other patients. Since 2023, soldiers returning from the war have been entitled to out-of-turn medical service.
The outlet reported that nearly every major medical facility in St. Petersburg currently holds wounded personnel from the front. At the city's Mariinsky Hospital alone, more than 2,000 operations were performed on military patients over the past year, according to publicly disclosed figures.
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A former nurse at the Dzhanelidze Research Institute of Emergency Medicine told the outlet that the true scale is deliberately concealed. "They don't really talk about the SVO guys, because there are so many of them, and no one wants to announce that there are so damn many that military hospitals can't fit them," she stated.
The same nurse described persistent problems with the conduct of military patients on the wards. "They were buying up alcohol, deliveries were constantly arriving for them, the garbage bins were full of bottles, they wouldn't listen to doctors or nurses," she added.
The strain on Russia's hospital system corresponds with mounting battlefield losses documented by foreign analysts.
The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has estimated that Russia's total casualties in Ukraine reached roughly 1.198 million by January 2026, including 873,000 wounded and 325,000 killed.
CSIS analysts described the figures as "unprecedented," noting that no major power has sustained losses on this scale since World War II.
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