Vedomosti: the government approved the refusal to pay pensions to military pensioners from the CIS

The government supported the denunciation of the Agreement on pensions for the military and their families and state insurance for military personnel from the CIS countries. It is reported Vedomosti with a link to the source. It also provides for the rejection of a similar agreement on pensions for employees of the border troops of the CIS states.

The initiative was developed by the Foreign Ministry together with the FSB. The explanatory note says that in recent years, Russia has very often paid pensions to people who did not serve in the military either in the USSR or in the Russian Federation. This, as the authors of the bill explain, leads to an increase in fictitious migration flows of foreign military pensioners to Russia, where the level of pensions is the highest in the CIS.

At the same time, the pensions of former Russian military pensioners who moved to live in another country are much lower, which “causes fair complaints.” Thus, now Russia “actually pays for the pension provision of military personnel of foreign states.”

The authors of the document believe that the above agreements were designed to protect the rights of Soviet military pensioners “for the transitional period”, and this task was completed. The main reasons for their denunciation was “the resulting injustice”.

The draft law stipulates the possibility of concluding other agreements on pensions in the format of international bilateral agreements.

Vedomosti notes that Ukraine withdrew from the CIS in 2019 and denounced the agreement on military pensions on December 23, 2022.

“A huge number of veterans also live on the territory of modern Ukraine and in other republics that display an extremely unfriendly policy,” Vyacheslav Kalinin, a member of the public council under the Ministry of Defense, told the publication.

First Deputy Minister of Finance Leonid Gornin in the State Duma in October 2022 said that the average pension through the Ministry of Defense would be 41,900 rubles. The State Duma told Vedomosti that payments to military pensioners are made by the Ministry of Defense, but they could not specify the number of pensioners from the CIS permanently residing in Russia.

Daria Erozbek