Those who did not return from the battle will have to wait six months – Newspaper Kommersant No. 43 (7488) of 03/15/2023

A group of senators and deputies of the State Duma proposed to reduce the period for recognizing servicemen as missing and dead from two years to six months. If representatives of the command staff became eyewitnesses of the death, the status of the deceased will be assigned even faster – at the request of the commander. The law is proposed to be extended to all soldiers who have disappeared in the NVO zone since February 24, 2022. Human rights activists and lawyers interviewed by Kommersant indicate that the changes will help the relatives of military personnel in the prompt receipt of payments, benefits and inheritance. However, Kommersant’s interlocutors do not exclude the appearance of “fraudulent schemes” when applying for the required benefits.

Andrey Turchak, senator and head of the working group on NVO issues, announced the proposal to shorten the time for recognizing the military as missing and dead. Today, “it is not easy to confirm the death of a person in the standard way,” he explained, you need to wait at least two years “from the moment the hostilities end”, all this time the families will be left without payments and social support measures. In order not to wait for the end of the SVO and to reduce the period of recognition as missing, it will be necessary to change the Civil and Civil Procedure Codes.

The relevant amendments were submitted to the State Duma on Tuesday. Andrei Turchak was co-authored by nine senators and deputies of all Duma factions. “Both bills have a common social focus and are designed to protect the interests of military family members, as well as the interests of military personnel in ensuring the safety of their property in cases where their location is unknown,” the explanatory notes say.

It should be recalled that the working group on SVO, created at the end of last year by the head of state, consisting of deputies, senators and officials, reported by February that “more than 22 thousand appeals” were processed from the military and their relatives: most of the complaints concerned rehabilitation, payments and the status of “deceased” and “missing”, without which relatives could not count on benefits. A report was sent to Vladimir Putin, which included a proposal to reduce the term for assigning the status of “missing” to three or six months. On the basis of this proposal, the bills submitted to the State Duma on March 14 appeared.

Thus, in order to recognize a participant in hostilities as dead, “a statement from the commander who saw his death will be enough,” Mr. Turchak explained the initiative.

“If there are no direct witnesses to this, but the person is missing, it will take no more than six months to recognize him as missing,” he promised. After obtaining the status of a missing person, relatives through the court will be able to initiate the procedure for recognizing a serviceman as dead. The government will have to determine the procedure for issuing death certificates, the text of the amendments says. It also states that the initiative will allow “promptly protecting the rights of family members of military personnel to receive social guarantees, insurance amounts and other payments.”

It is proposed to apply the rules primarily to “citizens who participated in a special military operation” in the territories of Ukraine, the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions “or in the course of an armed provocation” on the border of the Russian Federation. At the same time, the document will have a “retroactive effect” – it will affect the combatants, “including those mobilized”, who disappeared in the special operation zone not from the date of signing the law, but from February 24, 2022, the first day of military operations of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine.

To a greater extent, the effect of the laws will affect families with children and relatives who did not return the bodies of dead soldiers from the war zone, said Eva Merkacheva, a member of the Human Rights Council. She claims that she received a large number of requests related to the search for the missing military and the inability of relatives to establish their status. “Two options are possible: when the body is there and when it is not. Laws (proposed by the CBO group.— “b”), as it seems to me, are more concerned with the second option, when there are no remains and the corpse cannot be identified,” explains Ms. Merkacheva. “In this case, many relatives, of course, will want a simplified procedure, because they will be able to get all the documents faster in this way, arrange benefits, inheritance, transfer of property. In families with children, women will be able to quickly confirm the loss of a breadwinner and start receiving payments and additional benefits.”

A simplified recognition procedure may lead to the creation of fraudulent schemes for receiving payments and benefits from the state, Sergei Uchitel, a partner at Pen & Paper, fears. He calls the proposed amendments an “objective consequence” of attempts to resolve the “acute problem” of helping families obtain state support. According to the current procedure, this support is “impossible” until the family proves the “fact of the unknown absence” of a military relative. Mr. Teacher also points to the “positive” giving of the new norms “retroactive force” – the extension of the operation of laws for the entire period of the NWO.

Ms. Merkacheva, in turn, hopes that families who do not agree to recognize relatives as dead will be provided not only with the help of psychologists, but “and representatives of the Ministry of Defense”, who will have to communicate with people, “explain in detail what happened to their father or son”, to help “to restore the tragic events and accept them”.

Maria Starikova