On Monday, President Putin signed a decree providing 5 million rubles to the families of National Guard members who died in Ukraine and Syria. TASS news agency reports, reproduced by Reuters.
The amount corresponds to approximately 800,000 Norwegian kroner.
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Reuters interprets Putin’s statement as official confirmation that members of the National Guard are among the dead in Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The Russian National Guard was formed in 2016, and reports directly to President Putin. The group’s tasks are to fight terrorism and organized crime, and it has been used domestically to suppress peaceful demonstrations against the Putin regime, according to Reuters.
Acknowledgment: Putin’s compensation to the families of fallen National Guard soldiers should be interpreted as confirmation that members of this group are among the dead in Ukraine, Reuters believes. Photo: Mikhail Klementev / Sputnik / Agence France-Presse / NTB
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According to Reuters, the group has been in Ukraine since the early days of the war, which experts have pointed out that Russia had a misconception that seizing power in Kyiv, among other places, would be easy.
Experts noted that the goal was to deploy the National Guard in Kyiv, if Russia seized power in the Ukrainian capital.
No update losses
However, the plan failed, as Ukraine put up great resistance and fighting broke out on the outskirts of Kyiv. As a result, Russia gradually withdrew from the metropolitan area, and is now concentrating its forces in the battle of the Donbass region, in the east of the country.
President Putin had announced earlier that he would compensate the families of the dead and wounded soldiers. However, Russia has not updated the official death toll since March 25, according to Reuters. At that time, 1,351 soldiers were reported to have died in Ukraine, and 3,825 were wounded.
Both Ukraine and Western countries believe the number is much higher.
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