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Government figures?
The Business Life story said that as of 1 February this year, compensation
payments had been made to more than 2,000 families of dead Russian
soldiers and 3,200 personnel with grave injuries.
It said the Russian government approved payments of 3 million rubles
(about 28,000) for bereaved families and 1.5 million roubles (14,000) for
soldiers left with a disability.
So-called "contract fighters" would be paid 1,800 rubles (16) for every day
spent in the conflict zone, it said.
The paragraphs containing these figures were mysteriously deleted after
they started to attract attention, but a Ukrainian website, Novy Region,
saved an early version of the page and splashed on the news.
If true, the story would be the first evidence of the Russian government
admitting that its regular forces are fighting in eastern Ukraine, and the
highest estimate yet published of the scale of Russian losses.
Nemtsov dossier
At the time of his assassination near the Kremlin in February, the Russian
opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was compiling a report that alleged
hundreds of Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine, only for their deaths to be
covered up by the authorities.
He wrote: "From the very beginning of the conflict the Russian authorities
were carefully concealing the information about the killed citizens of the
Russian Federation on the territory of the Ukraine, and especially the
military servicemen of our country, who participated in the fighting.
"However, it was impossible to hide this information completely."
Nemtsov's sources told him the families of some soldiers killed during a
Ukrainian army offensive in the summer of 2014 were being paid 3 million
rubles in compensation - the same sum mentioned in the Business Life
story.
The payments were said to be one reason why relatives were reluctant to
criticise the Russian government publicly or draw attention to the deaths -
Kiev has also captured a number of men it says are Russian soldiers.
Two alleged special forces operatives detained in Ukraine in May told OSCE
monitors they were "members of a unit of the armed forces of the Russian
Federation" and had been deployed in Ukraine before, the OSCE special
monitoring mission said.
Putin U-turn
President Putin has previously denied Russian forces were involved in the
military takeover of Crimea in March last year, before later admitting he
personally sent troops into the peninsula.
At first he described the unidentified armed men who seized control of the
region as "local self-defence units".
But at a later press conference Mr Putin said: "We had to take unavoidable
steps so that events did not develop as they are currently developing in
south east Ukraine. Of course our troops stood behind Crimeas self-defence
forces."
In a big-budget Russian TV documentary in March this year, the president
Posted by Thavam