SOME find it relaxing to be covered head to toe in black, smelly mud. Others become a bit gloomy, particularly when the spa is half-empty and is in disputed territory. The job of Lieutenant Doctor Igor Aleksandrovich Dovgan, director of the gracelessly named Saki Military Clinical Sanatorium N.I. Pirogov, is to keep his guests on the relaxed side—the paying ones, at least. The spa, on the sunny shores of the Black Sea, pampers private clients, while taking a boot-camp approach to the wounded veterans it treats at the expense of the Russian state.

Dr Dovgan has run the sanatorium ever since it was seized (like all other state-owned property) from the Ukrainian defence ministry after Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014. It is in good shape, with friendly staff and functional, if somewhat military-looking, equipment. The gardens are immaculate: no sooner does a rose shed a petal than a gardener rushes to pick it up. A plaque commemorates the night in 1945 when the spa sheltered Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on their way to meet Stalin at Yalta.

When Crimea was Ukrainian the sanatorium was fully booked. Now it seems to run at half-capacity. Crimea is on the back burner of global diplomacy these days, but Russia is finding occupation much more costly than it expected. Western sanctions mean credit cards do not work, mobile phones do not roam and some software does not upgrade. There are frequent blackouts. The peninsula’s isolation from the Ukrainian mainland has recently been made worse by a blockade of food-importing trucks imposed by Crimean Tatars from Kiev. A lone ferry line connects it to the remote part of the Caucasus that is the closest bit of Russian land.

Ukrainians have stopped coming to Crimean spas. Well-heeled Russians mostly head for Turkey, Thailand or Egypt. So the Pirogov sanatorium must target Russia’s budget travellers. It has a distinctly Soviet feel: an exhibition entitled “Afghanistan—We Remember” shows photos of veterans, and down the corridor patients in wheelchairs trade stories of exploits in Dagestan and Abkhazia. Another exercises his spine, wounded in what Russians call the “First Chechen War” in 1994-96. The entertainment is strictly Brezhnev-era. As one visitor noted approvingly on TripAdvisor: “ Pirogov is so ‘Back to the USSR’.”

Up the road the former Lenin Sanatorium, now known as Sakropol, is taking a different path to profit. It offers more intimate massages: “vacuum-laser massage for correction of erection” costs a mere 356 roubles ($5.80). On the shores of Lake Saki, those who cannot afford any of Crimea’s almost 150 sanatoria simply grab handfuls of muck and smear themselves for nothing. Among them are a police officer from Smolensk who suffers from oedema, a paediatric nurse from Kiev and two Chechen ex-fighters with bullet wounds. Coated in mud, everyone is equal.