5,000 Russian soldiers died in Chechnya last year - report

Almost 5,000 Russian soldiers were killed in the breakaway republic of Chechnya last year and more than 13,000 were wounded, the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted military officials as saying today in the first apparent acknowledgement of high casualties in the near 3 1/2-year-old conflict.

The casualty figures released to the state agency by the North Caucasus Military District were much higher than previous official data on losses during the war.

In December, the Interfax news agency quoted the Russian military command in Chechnya as saying that Russia had lost 4,705 soldiers, officers and policemen in Chechnya since the war started in 1999.

It said that 13,040 other military and police representatives had been wounded between 1 October 1999 and 15 December 2002, and that 28 others were missing.

Major Igor Kaverin, a spokesman for the North Caucasus Military District headquarters, denied today that it had issued the casualty report to the ITAR-Tass. He refused to give any casualty figures, saying he was not authorised to do so.

The Defence Ministry issued an official denial of the ITAR-Tass report, saying that 4,572 servicemen had been killed in Chechnya between the war’s start and December 23 and 15,549 more had been wounded.

In spite of the denials, ITAR-Tass said it stood by its report. The one-time state news agency of the Soviet Union, ITAR-Tass has maintained a close relationship with the Russian government.

It said 4,739 Russian servicemen were killed in the breakaway republic last year 13,108 were wounded and 29 went missing,

Human rights groups have long accused the military of downplaying its losses in the war – Russia’s second in Chechnya in a decade. Casualty figures are tallied through different government structures – with the Defence and Interior Ministries keeping separate counts of their own troops, for example – and are impossible to verify independently.

The casualty reports issued by the government throughout the war have often been contradictory, apparently reflecting official attempts to conceal losses in order to prove that the rebels have been defeated. But despite official claims that the war is largely over, federal troops and pro-Moscow Chechen police continue to suffer daily losses in rebel ambushes and mine explosions.

The respected Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia group, basing its information on information from wounded troops and soldiers’ relatives, estimates that about 11,000 servicemen have been killed and more than 30,000 wounded since the war’s start, said its chief Valentina Melnikova.