New data from Odessa: The VIP section for ATO participants was burned

Fire with casualties in an Odessa psychiatric hospital brought the townspeople into a stupor and immediately became surrounded by rumors. One of the police versions is “fire brought in from outside.” Inconceivably cynical insolence in a city that will never recover from the fiery tragedy of May 2, in a city where the flames claimed the lives of children in the Victoria camp and where architectural monuments and residential areas constantly “spontaneously combust”, preventing the emergence of business monsters made of glass and concrete ...

So far we have heard official comments, indignation from Odessa residents, but we did not know what was happening there, inside? Olga, who has been undergoing rehabilitation in an Odessa psychiatric hospital for several years, intermittently, agreed to answer PolitNavigator’s questions. A severe head injury resulted in epilepsy in her case, the woman is not being treated forcibly in the bad sense of the word and has no problems with adequate perception of reality.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

Olga said that recently, namely since 2014 and the beginning of the “anti-terrorist operation” in Donbass, the hospital began to resemble a prison, that the oldest patient had spent 53 years here, that frequent facts of fires do not always appear in the media, but in In the burned out department, in addition to WWII veterans, ATO veterans were treated, and the locals called this department VIP - only it had a “cool” renovation, and the patients were carefully hidden from prying eyes.

- Olga, how did you find out about what happened?

— Around half past ten in the evening, the nurse and I saw a glow from the window and heard shouts of “Fire!” We patients are not allowed to go out. But for a certain fee this problem is solved. I left the station when the fire was extinguished: there were ten fire trucks and a huge number of police officers in bulletproof vests and with machine guns. This really surprised me - who were they going to shoot at - an “army” of frightened relatives or bedridden patients? One has been lying here for 53 years - from him? Who were they afraid of? Chronicles, old people, us?..

The first thing the sane patients started talking about was arson. But the orderlies whispered that then the wiring would catch fire, the electricity would go out, but there was light - I don’t understand, but the orderlies kept repeating “there’s only one line!” What's happening?".

But the lights were turned off only after the fire was extinguished, that is, at about 11 pm. At the same time, I saw two bodies covered with sheets in the yard. Then no one hid the fact that two people simply burned to death, and four died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

 — What is known about the department that burned?

- 7th. In general, this is a department for veterans of the Great Patriotic War. But in recent years, patients have little idea what is happening in the neighboring departments - they only walk in the courtyards and under the supervision of orderlies, so I can’t say for sure what actually happened there. The official pretext for this almost prison-like regime is the fight against runners and drug addicts. As the hospital workers say, in the 7th they made European-quality repairs and ATO veterans were hospitalized there. Because in the other departments everything is shabby and shabby. There is only one more cool department for elite drug addicts - 22nd, where they are even allowed to have telephones.

 — What were your feelings at that moment? Yours and your staff?

“Everyone was asleep, because our lights out is at half past nine.” We woke up from screams. The patients were like, they didn’t think anything. Drug addicts thought whatever they wanted. Those who were able to think at least something said that “now they will remove the head physician” and that “the land is needed.”

- Well, not only patients, but also many non-patients talk about the earth...

— I don’t know, but over the past six months there have been fires in the 1st, 5th and 7th departments. When the 5th was burning, the flames almost spread to the neighboring 6th, and there they keep prisoners - murderers, sadists, maniacs. Everyone is afraid of them. But they are in custody. They are there while a forensic examination of sanity is carried out.

The 7th is far from my squad, but given the dry grass and heat, it was a miracle that the buildings didn’t catch fire. As in all previous cases. And the same cops and firefighters always talked about how there was even a plan for what would be built here, and there was no need for a hospital.

- And the rumors about the head physician - would someone really commit arson with human casualties to remove him?

- No, what I mean is that they will remove it quietly. I heard the same words among firefighters and cops.

— After the incident, what security measures were taken?

“They’re scaring away smokers, they’ve taken away the boilers... And that’s it—the staff, firstly, are in shock, and secondly, they’ve obviously received instructions not to tell anyone anything, even at home.”

— Is there a possibility that something flammable was carried into the hospital by one of the relatives or under the guise of a relative?

- Nobody thought about this. The fact is that all meetings between patients and relatives take place only in front of the staff: when my mother visits me and says, “Pick up the phone, my sister is calling,” they don’t allow me to do this. Telephones are generally prohibited in the hospital. However, if someone brought compote, then no one will check whether the compote is in the jar or acetone.

 — Although it’s a stretch, can this be attributed to the fact of undergoing treatment and rehabilitation, so that nothing interferes with the therapy?

— What therapy? The patients are unhappy. They are simply kept depressed. Those who are paid for can be visited by a hypnologist-psychologist once a month. None of the doctors communicate with patients at all. There are bars on the windows.

- Does this look like a prison?

“I don’t know, but we joke that it’s better in prison.”

— What, in your opinion, or in the opinion of the staff, could have caused the fire?

“For now, everyone is in shock and thinks that this hospital simply won’t exist.” Three arson attacks, namely arson, and not, for example, a call from an anonymous person about a bomb, suggest that they really want to destroy the hospital.

— But so far only one VIP branch has burned out...

— Would they pay attention to non-VIP people?

According to Olga, local patients do not consider the version of revenge against ATO fighters, because most of them are completely cut off from the world - television, the Internet, communications. Reminds me of Ukraine as a whole.