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Moscow Times
September 21, 2004
Trading Blood for Money
By Pavel Felgenhauer

President Vladimir Putin's response last week to the terrorist threat facing Russia amazed the nation. A colonel in the Defense Ministry, a decorated veteran of Russia's local wars, told me: "After Putin announced his plan, we got our staff together, but no one could make any sense of the proposals. We thought the president would give us clear directives and provide practical assistance. But how can replacing the elected governor in Yaroslavl with an appointed one help us confront the real enemy in the Caucasus?"

In the armed conflict with Chechen separatists since 1994 -- interrupted by an uneasy truce from 1996-1999 -- Russian servicemen have incurred heavier losses than Russian civilians have incurred from separatist-related terrorist attacks. On the Chechen side, noncombatants have suffered most often.

Official Russian casualty figures are either deliberately distorted or simply unavailable. The authorities routinely cook the books when it comes to body counts, reducing federal losses and inflating the number of "terrorists" and "bandits" killed. The task of keeping track of casualties is complicated by the sheer number of military and security agencies involved in the conflict, including the Defense Ministry, Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service. Each major agency is divided in turn into semi-autonomous departments, each with its own accounting procedure.

As a result, the public has no idea how many young men have died in the conflict, and as always it lacks the power to force its rulers to come clean. The Kremlin apparently doesn't know, or even want to know, the true number.

The military and security services do, however, have estimates of the dead and wounded in the Caucasus intended for internal use only. These estimates are unofficial, and cannot be considered entirely accurate. In fact, they may contain inflated numbers in an attempt to offset the litany of official lies. Whatever the case, insiders whom I have interviewed agree that the death toll among Russian servicemen since 1994 is close to 20,000. More than half a million servicemen (active and retired) have served in Chechnya during that time, and are now war veterans. More than 100,000 men have been wounded, and some 60,000 are now invalids.

In Beslan, after nearly 12 hours of fighting with the terrorists, 11 FSB officers from elite anti-terrorist units had been killed, with more than 30 wounded, many of them seriously. The two FSB units that incurred those casualties, Alfa and Vympel, consist of just a few hundred men. Their losses in Beslan were the heaviest ever in a single operation.

It has been reported that some of the Alfa and Vympel officers killed or wounded at Beslan were not wearing body armor. At first I dismissed this possibility. It seemed unthinkable that morale had sunk that low, and that the very best of Russia's soldiers had gone into combat without body armor. But footage shown on state television confirmed the reports. Among other irregularities, a special forces sniper positioned in a building facing the school was shown in a bandanna and T-shirt rather than the required helmet and body armor.

State television broadcast this footage as evidence that special forces were not planning to storm the building. But the Kremlin spin doctors didn't realize that the images also provided damning evidence of a total collapse of discipline. I watched the rot set in during the first Chechen war in the mid-1990s. Soldiers began discarding heavy, unwieldy body armor. They pillaged and used the loot to buy bandannas, sunglasses and leather mittens that they proceeded to wear in combat situations in a war zone.

Officers either could not or would not discipline the soldiers, and morale plummeted. Now the elite units have succumbed as well. The conflict in Chechnya rages on with no end in sight, and the casualties continue to mount. The Kremlin, meanwhile, is exploiting the situation to abolish the direct election of regional leaders.

Everyone, including the military rank and file, understands that Putin proposed these reforms with one goal in mind: increasing the volume of bribes it rakes in by auctioning off gubernatorial appointments to the highest bidder. The very foundation of Putin's despotic state is disintegrating as personnel in the military and security services watch the brass brazenly trading their blood for money.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.