State Duma proposes to recognize the Participants of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine as veterans

The bill on granting the status of veterans to the military was approved by the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs.

The special status gives the military the right to provide a number of social benefits, which include monthly cash payments to military personnel or their families.

In a number of regions, there are also laws that allow free allocation of land plots to war veterans for individual housing construction.

“Chairman of the committee Yaroslav Nilov said that if the bill is adopted in the first reading at the plenary session of the State Duma on March 23, it is recommended to consider the bill in two subsequent readings for efficiency”, - Kommersant writes.

To date, the status of combat veterans is assigned to persons who served in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria. As of 2020, there were about 1.6 million combat veterans in Russia.

According to the Ministry of Defense on March 2, since February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin officially announced the start of a military special operation in Ukraine, the Russian army has lost 498 people killed and another 1,597 were injured. In the past 20 days, the Ministry of Defense has not updated official data on the dead and wounded.

The publication in the media of data on the losses of the Russian army from unofficial sources by the new legislation of the Russian Federation on " fake news " is not allowed under the threat of criminal prosecution. In cases where the investigation proves that the publication of such data caused serious consequences, the perpetrators face up to 15 years in prison.

On the eve it became known that the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation opened a criminal case against journalist Alexander Nevzorov for spreading fakes about the actions of the Russian military.

According to the agency, on March 9, he published on Instagram *, and later on his YouTube channel, deliberately false information about the deliberate shelling of the Mariupol maternity hospital by the RF Armed Forces. The sources of the photos that were in his post are the Ukrainian media.

In addition, by the decision of the Presnensky Court of Moscow, Sergey Klokov, a technician at the reserve control point of the city head office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was arrested until May 16 in the case of spreading fakes about Russian military personnel.

*banned and recognized as extremist in the Russian Federation