Russia will reduce payments to troops injured in Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine as his government faces ballooning war costs and huge personnel losses.
A Kremlin decree introduced Wednesday and signed by the Russian president restricts medical payouts of 3 million rubles ($30,000) to those who suffer severe injuries in combat.
Previously the sum was available to anyone wounded. Now those with less severe injuries will only get between one million rubles ($10,000) and 100,000 rubles ($1,000).
Under the Kremlin's new guidelines, soldiers will only receive full compensation if they suffer "Section I" injuries that endanger their life or health or cause significant damage to their organs, such as severe spinal injuries, brain damage, rib fractures and broken limbs.
Less severe or "Section II" injuries warranting $10,000 compensation are temporary wounds such as, concussions, minor fractures and gunshot wounds that don't affect organs. Newsweek has contacted the Russian defense ministry for comment.
Legislation introduced at the start of the war in March 2022 entitling the families of those killed in the war to 7.4 million rubles ($75,000) compensation remains in place.
Deputy defense minister Anna Tsivileva raised the issue of injury compensation earlier this month, saying that the previous system did not take into account the seriousness of injuries and authorities had earlier discussed introducing a sliding scale of payments, Russian business newspaper RBC reported.
Estimates from researchers in the U.S. in July suggested that the Kremlin faces eye-watering costs for its payouts to casualties in the war.
Thomas Lattanzio from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Harry Stevens from the Center for the National Interest estimated in an article for the website War on the Rocks that the price tag as of May 2024 was 2.3 trillion rubles ($26 billion)— or around 6 percent of the country's total 2024 budget.
Russian forces are reportedly making incremental gains on the battlefield in the Donetsk region but at a high cost, with Ukraine's defense ministry saying on Thursday that Moscow had suffered 1,690 casualties over the previous day.
This takes Kyiv's estimate of Russian killed and wounded over the course of the war to 716,070, although other tallies are lower and it is difficult to get an exact number of personnel losses with both sides keeping tight-lipped about these figures.
Russia's losses have raised speculation about what Putin will do next to replenish dwindling troop numbers with the country faced by a shortage of workers and the prospect of widespread discontent at a new mobilization order.
An investigation by independent Russian language outlet iStories this week found that amid a push to replenish high troop losses, some regions in Russia are using up to half their social welfare budgets for signing on bonuses to attract more recruits.
These payments are being drawn from funds which in peacetime mostly supported orphans, large families, people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups.
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