MOSCOW — The deaths or wounds of
Russian soldiers in “special operations” can be classified as military secrets,
even in peacetime, President Vladimir V. Putin decreed Thursday. The
decree comes as Russia faces accusations that
it is sending its soldiers clandestinely to fight inUkraine, an allegation the Kremlin
denies.
Mr. Putin’s decree amended a law that had let the military keep soldiers’ deaths or injuries secret only in times of war.
Mr. Putin has repeatedly insisted that Russian soldiers are not taking part in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where government forces and pro-Russian separatists keep fighting despite a cease-fire deal in February.
At home, Russia’s political opposition says that by refusing to acknowledge that its soldiers are in combat in Ukraine, the Russian military is unjustly denying them disability payments and denying their relatives death benefits and other awards.
All the while, there are widespread indications of a rising casualty toll for Russian soldiers, including wounded ones showing up at hospitals, new graves appearing in cemeteries and testimony from relatives of the dead.
Mr. Putin’s
press secretary, Dmitry S. Peskov, said Thursday that the amendment was “not
tied to Ukraine,” but was just a routine “improvement in the law in the area of
state secrets.”
Yet Mr. Putin’s decree could empower the police to arrest journalists or human rights activists who gather information about soldiers’ deaths, according to Ivan Y. Pavlov, a human rights lawyer. He called it a tacit acknowledgment of covert action by the Russian military.
“It was done so Ukrainian issues will be secured against unwanted attention,” Mr. Pavlov said in a telephone interview.
The decree, published Thursday on a government website, came after members of the political opposition issued a report saying that at least 220 serving Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine since last spring. That report includes details gathered by the opposition leader Boris Y. Nemtsov, who was killed on a Moscow street in February.
Witnesses have described secret nighttime burials illuminated by truck headlights. Relatives of dead soldiers have told journalists about confusion over whether their loved ones died in training accidents in southern Russia or in combat in Ukraine.
Caught between a desire to honor its soldiers and a need to maintain secrecy in an earlier phase of the Ukraine conflict, the annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin has wavered. At first, it denied any Russian military role in Crimea, where soldiers in ski masks and uniforms with no insignia mysteriously appeared in March 2014 and helped expel the Ukrainian government from the peninsula. Later, the Kremlin acknowledged that the soldiers were Russian troops and even created a holiday in their honor.
When the conflict moved east the next month to Donetsk and Luhansk, two primarily Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine near the Russian border, Russian officials once again denied any involvement, but those denials have evoked broad skepticism.
The Ukrainian military captured two men this month who were wounded in a firefight in the Luhansk region. In videos recorded in a Ukrainian military hospital, the two said they were Russian soldiers ordered to serve tours in Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that both men had served in the Russian Army but denied that they were on active duty at the time of their capture.
Russian soldiers have previously described signing pro forma letters of resignation from the military before crossing the border to fight in Ukraine, while continuing to operate as members of Russian military units.
The United Nations says that more than 6,000 soldiers
and civilians have died in the fighting in Ukraine. The United States and other
Western governments say there is no doubt that Russia is fueling the fire by
sending men and weapons to assist the rebels.
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