Report cites bigger losses in Chechnya 

The Associated Press 

Tuesday, February 18, 2003  


ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia In 2002, 4,739 Russian servicemen were killed in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, 13,108 other troops were wounded and 29 were listed as missing, the Itar-Tass news agency quoted military officials as saying Monday. Those totals were much higher than previously reported official figures for the conflict, which is nearly three and a half years old.

The Defense Ministry issued an official denial of the report. Soon thereafter, Itar-Tass dropped the story and subsituted for it a terse report offering the same toll as the ministry: 4,572 servicemen killed and 15,549 wounded between the war's beginning in the autumn of 1999 and Dec. 23, 2002.

A duty editor at Itar-Tass, the state's central information agency in Russia, refused to provide any explanation of the contradictory stories. Earlier in the day, another editor had said that the agency stood by the version reporting higher casualties.

Human rights groups have long accused the military of understating its losses in the war, Russia's second in Chechnya in a decade. Casualty figures are tallied through different government structures - with the Defense 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 have often been contradictory, apparently reflecting official attempts to conceal losses 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, which based its data on information from wounded troops and soldiers' relatives, estimates that about 11,000 servicemen have been killed and more than 30,000 others wounded since the start of the conflict, said its chief, Valentina Melnikova. During the previous Chechnya war, from 1994 to 1996, 14,000 died, according to the group's estimate, considerably more than twice the official toll of 5,500 dead and 700 missing.

Melnikova dismissed earlier government casualty reports as "nonsense" and said that the figures initially carried by Itar-Tass on Monday appeared to be genuine.

"The North Caucasus Military District collects all the information on casualties in Chechnya, because it's in charge of paying insurance benefits to the victims' families," Melnikova said in a telephone interview Monday. "They might have run into funding problems and decided to make the information on casualties public."