Russian civilian healthcare is facing unprecedented pressure. Military hospitals under the administration of the Ministry of Defense stopped handling the massive influx of wounded soldiers from the front in Ukraine.
This was discovered by an independent editor who mapped the situation in Russian regions. According to her findings, the capacities of military medicine are so overloaded that the state was forced to introduce a system of priority care for participants of the so-called “special military operation” (SVO; that’s how they call the war in Ukraine in Russia, note red.) at the expense of the civilian population.
Military hospitals instead of maternity hospitals
One of the main centers of military medicine has become the Omsk region, which local activists call the “Omsk anomaly” because of the huge concentration of wounded. The region lies deep in the Russian interior, where Ukrainian drones and missiles cannot reach, which makes it an ideal place for infirmaries.
At the end of 2025, the local authorities closed the city’s gynecological clinic for good, handing over its premises to the army to establish a polyclinic for veterans. Even before that, the same fate befell Omsk city maternity hospital no. 5, in which approximately 2,500 births took place annually. The state pumped hundreds of millions of rubles from the federal and regional budget into its reconstruction into a military hospital and painted its facade in the colors of the Russian tricolor.
A similar scenario was repeated in other cities. In Moscow, due to the needs of the army, they canceled the only specialized hospital for patients with a rare genetic disease (cystic fibrosis), and in Rostov-on-Don they transformed maternity hospital No. 5.
Lack of medication and discipline problems
Since the capacities of the Ministry of Defense are insufficient despite the construction boom, wounded soldiers are placed en masse directly in the wards of ordinary city hospitals. According to the testimonies of medical professionals from St. Petersburg, the situation in civilian facilities is unsustainable. According to them, wounded soldiers often suffer from severe post-traumatic syndrome (PTSD), refuse to respect the staff, violate discipline and routinely use alcohol or marijuana in the wards.
“In the end, many military patients had to be hastily transferred to the military hospital in Severomorsk in the Murmansk region. The wards breathed a sigh of relief. In addition to their problematic behavior, the soldiers literally ate almost all the supplies of antibiotics and consumables that the hospital needed to treat ordinary civilian patients,” a former nurse from the St. Petersburg Research Institute of Emergency Medicine told Russian independent media.
Although the treatment of soldiers in civilian facilities should be reimbursed from special state transfers, in practice, according to lawyers, this means a hidden drain on the already limited resources of the public health system.
Civilian patients are sent home
At the beginning of 2026, the Russian Minister of Health, Mikhail Muraško, officially admitted a massive personnel collapse – the country currently lacks more than 23,000 doctors and over 63,000 nurses.
While ordinary Russians wait months for examinations, from 2023 the law applies, according to which soldiers must be treated immediately and as a matter of priority. Combined with the disruption of regional hospitals, this leads to drastic situations where civilian patients are sent home in critical condition.
Testimonies of desperate relatives are multiplying on social networks. One of the residents of Omsk described her experience with her seriously ill mother, who was refused hospitalization in the inpatient ward after three difficult operations. “The only thing that came out of the primary was: ‘There are no places! There are people from the SVO… You understand,'” she described the reality of free Russian healthcare, which has fully surrendered to the needs of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
