According to the official statement of the Judge Advocate General 471 servicemen of Russian army are lost as a result of crimes and accidents in 2008. This is 29 persons more then the previous year. “Upward of half of these cases are suicides”, as explained by the Judge Advocate General Sergey Fridinskiy. “This sad statistics is far from being fair” said Valentina Melnikova, the Chairwoman of the Union of Soldiers` Mothers Committees commentin on the Advocate General’s statement. “They do not register losses in other kinds of troops: internal military troops, construction battalion, emergency situation forces and other subdivisions. We do not know what happens there. The number of suicides is shocking. 10 years ago a number of suicides among officers began to grow rapidly. It was a result of inefficient arrangement of military reforms. The Ministry of Defense initiated a campaign on suicide prevention, but it does not work, unfortunately. Both officers and soldiers in particular (both contract soldiers and conscripts) still face severe problems. Sometimes officers or soldiers are killed, but in order to avoid responsibility the perpetrators give out their murders as suicides. The number of 471excludes those who died in hospitals from failure to assist, who died within a year after demobilization” she said.
Within a period from December 20 to January 10, 95 soldiers were put in the military hospital of Elansk. One of them, 23-year-old Anton Yumatov, died in a few days. Military Prosecutor of Privolzhsko-Ural Department, initiated a criminal procedure on his death. As the Deputy Military Judge of the Department announced “a host of pneumonia might be brought on by wrong arrangement of barracks”. The bride Yumatov Daria Novgorodtseva claims that the soldiers were continually forced to do physical exercises outside in freezing temperatures (20 degrees below zero). She also mentioned that officers forced soldiers to wash the floors in the barracks at nights, and even sick Yumatov in spite of his fever was woken up and forced to wash the floors in the barrack. While representatives of Privolzhsko-Ural Department`s Command deny these stories, the Military Prosecutor has detected a number of violations connected with soldiers` maintenance in the department. The Deputy Military Prosecutor of Privolzhsko-Ural Department commented that “the barracks in Elansk were overcrowded, the norms were twofold oversized, small barrack-rooms are equipped with double-deck beds. This caused an active virus infection. Another violation is that ill soldiers were not isolated from healthy ones.” The commander of Elansk Training Center Viktor Bizyaev was removed from his post, since it is not the only accident in the units under his command. Now the leadership of the department has sent a petition to the Ministry of Defense with the request to discharge him. Yumatov`s relatives intend to take out a process against Russian Ministry of Defense.
Another urgent problem is soldiers` lethality rate in conflict zones. At the beginning of Georgia-South Osetia conflict Russian military leadership declared that conscripts did not participate in commitments there, but after several statements about conscripts` death from Russian regions, the Joint Staff should have admitted that this is untrue and that a number of conscripts are involved in the conflict there. The precise number is uncertain. The list, published in “Komsomolskaya Pravda” newspaper consists of 51 names, five of them conscripts. “According to the law (1995), conscripts may be used for a peace making only and only under voluntary contracts. “If a soldier under contract is injured during military commitments in conflict zones, he gains compensations, a right to be treated in special military hospitals and other privileges. In case a conscript becomes disabled, he is discharged from the army with a disability grant less then 2 000 rubles and northing more.” Melnikova explained.
