Vladimir Putin announced the creation of a fund to support veterans

President Vladimir Putin announced the creation of a special state fund, the task of which is targeted assistance to veterans of the military special operation and the families of the victims. He will deal with the full range of support for these categories of citizens: psychological, medical assistance, employment assistance, entrepreneurship development, advanced training, organization of long-term home care, etc.

The fund’s work should be open and simple, Putin said: “Without treasury and bureaucracy.” According to him, each veteran should be assigned a personal social worker-coordinator who “will work in real time” with veterans. The structures of the fund should be deployed in all subjects of the Federation by the end of 2023.

Putin gave instructions to organize the work to the government and the State Council commission on social policy. He also urged the governors to participate in this work. At the same time, the organization of the work of the new fund, which consolidates efforts to work with veterans and their families, does not remove the responsibility for social support that other authorities, including regional ones, have assumed.

This idea has been mentioned before. In particular, on December 21, 2022, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, at an expanded meeting of the board of the Ministry of Defense with the participation of Putin, announced the need to create such a fund.

“Together with the authorities, work has been organized to create a Federal Agency for Work with Veterans. This will allow us to centralize and make the system of social protection of military veterans more effective, ”the press service of the Ministry of Defense quoted him as saying. He noted that this initiative was supported by the president, for which Shoigu thanked him. At the same time, there was no specifics about what this fund would be like.

As Victor Sobolev, a member of the State Duma Defense Committee from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, explained to Vedomosti, now the law enforcement agencies themselves are dealing with the problems of social protection of veterans. According to the deputy, the need to create such an agency is due to the fact that a law was passed that equates all participants in the special operation to combat veterans, and coordination of executive authorities is necessary in terms of providing benefits. “We need both care and coordination for the children of the victims – a whole set of social measures that will be aimed at supporting veterans and their families,” he said.

Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs Yaroslav Nilov (LDPR), in turn, said that now veterans are divided into departmental ones, and social security agencies are also included in this work. “The issue is that there is no single body that would deal with all veterans,” Nilov said. According to him, it is “obvious” that now there will be many combat veterans and disabled people, and a single body is needed so that “representatives of the National Guard, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the Ministry of Defense, and civilians who have such a right can apply at one window understand what support measures are available.