Inside Ukraine's Forest Glade: The Three-Week Sanctuary Healing Soldiers' Invisible Wounds
Imagine a place hidden deep in a pine forest, with small lakes and ponies, far from the noisy city. In the middle stands a modernist Soviet building with marble walls, walls that have heard countless stories of suffering, loss, and death. This place, built in 1974 as a secret sanatorium for Soviet Ukrainian ministers, has evolved through history. It hosted soldiers returning from the 1979-89 Afghan-Soviet war, then those from the conflict in eastern Ukraine since 2014, and now, soldiers from every part of the Ukrainian front.
This place is called Forest Glade, an unusual mental health rehabilitation hospital where war-weary soldiers engage in activities like dancing tango, practicing yoga, climbing walls, playing music, tending gardens, caring for ponies, practicing archery, and participating in medieval battle games. All these efforts aim to heal the invisible wounds of war, combining medical, psychological, physical, and social support. Forest Glade helps soldiers experiencing symptoms of stress disorders, depression, anxiety, adjustment disorders, and the consequences of trauma, including PTSD. However, it has only three weeks to treat each soldier before they are sent back to the front.
A Suspended Zone from the Velocity of War
From the outside, the building retains the severity of late-Soviet modernism, with symmetry and institutional coldness, designed for authority rather than vulnerability. Yet inside, light falls generously across the corridors, and green plants interrupt the hardness of the stone. The space feels less like a hospital and more like a suspended zone, briefly removed from the velocity of war. On the first visit, the presence of billiard tables is striking, with the sharp sound of balls echoing through a large hall, immediately changing the expressions of newly arrived patients.
On the second floor, a small kiosk serves coffee before a terrace overlooking the pines, where men stand in silence, listening to birdsong. Down the corridor, others sit shoulder to shoulder, watching television, playing cards, and speaking in fragments about positions, shelling, and lost friends. Trauma rearranges chronology, with stories delivered flatly or disguised as humour.
Reclaiming Attention and Restoring Touch
In the courtyard, a rehabilitation doctor teaches archery, an exercise in reclaiming attention from intrusive memory. Drawing the bow demands stillness, regulated breath, and a body anchored to the ground, focusing on a single point until everything else recedes. In a sunlit office upstairs, doctors work with patients on memory reconstruction and fine motor skills, handling small objects and planting seedlings. There is a profound dissonance in watching men trained for combat relearn patience through tending to fragile plants, yet this dissonance matters deeply.
Every few weeks, a travelling petting zoo arrives, filling the foyer with soldiers cradling a cockerel against their chests, allowing a stick insect to move slowly across their hands, or laughing as someone dares to hold a large cockroach. They stroke a rabbit's back with deliberate gentleness, restoring a register of touch that war distorts, allowing the nervous system to soften briefly.
Structured Aggression and Controlled Re-entry
In the evenings, Forest Glade hosts "buhurt," staged medieval combat where soldiers wear padded armour and fight in teams using blunted foam weapons. This choreographed physicality creates a structured arena for expressing aggression without causing injury, evolving into an unconventional tool for psychological rehabilitation, particularly for veterans with PTSD. Beyond the hospital grounds, trips to karting tracks, ski slopes, climbing walls, and equestrian centres serve as controlled re-entry into environments demanding focus without mortal consequence.
Over the years, soldiers rarely speak about Forest Glade without a certain intensity, not gratitude but recognition. For Ksenia Savoskina, a Ukrainian film-maker, this became personal when her father became a patient there. He spent time undergoing acupuncture, reporting that persistent ringing in his ears subsided and headaches became less constant. His stammer softened, and he seemed less internally braced. However, upon returning to service, triggers like hypervigilance and physical symptoms reappeared quickly, highlighting how provisional recovery can be in the face of war's conditions.
The Impossibly Short Timetable of Healing
Three weeks is an impossibly short period to address cumulative trauma, a fact known by both doctors and soldiers, but dictated by the war's timetable. Kyrylo, the hero of the documentary No Time to Heal, first heard about Forest Glade while in captivity, advised by a fellow soldier to go there upon returning home. Each visit to Forest Glade holds the outside world at a distance, with anxiety becoming containable through a defined schedule and predictability that contrasts with war's constant unpredictability.
Forest Glade teaches soldiers to focus on what they can change and influence, ignoring events beyond their control. Soldiers repeatedly express feeling supported in this environment, describing it as an island of safety in the middle of a pine forest, shielding them from the brutality of war for three brief weeks. This sanctuary, though temporary, offers a crucial respite in the ongoing conflict, emphasizing the urgent need for mental health care amidst relentless frontline pressures.
