Translated material
War allowance
Moscow riot police sued the Central Internal Affairs Directorate for 600 thousand rubles
Two years after their business trip to Chechnya, 22 Moscow riot police fighters achieved full payment of their “fighting” money. Yesterday, the capital's Zamoskvoretsky Court upheld their claims and ordered the Moscow City Internal Affairs Directorate to pay them more than 600 thousand rubles. The Moscow trial is not the first and not the last in a series of cases involving “combat” money. The methods for calculating these compensations, adopted by government decree in 2001, are still particularly controversial. According to the document, payments are not made automatically for all days of the mission, but only for the days of direct participation of fighters in the counter-terrorism operation. The greatest disagreement arises precisely regarding the interpretation of the concept of “participation”.The Moscow riot police themselves, who served in Chechnya from January 14 to April 14, 2001, considered all the days they were on a business trip to be “combat.” At the trial, they assured that out of 89 days of duty they did not remember a single day off. According to the commander of the 1st company of the 3rd OMON battalion, Alexei Chernyakov, the soldiers constantly kept watch at checkpoints, took part in escorts, and neutralized mines on the roads. Moreover, there were corresponding entries about all this in combat journals. According to the riot police, for all this, each of them was underpaid 26,350 rubles. However, representatives of the defendants - the Moscow City Internal Affairs Directorate and the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs - refused to accept the logs of individual daily participation in hostilities as normative documents. According to the representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Sergei Mirzoyan, such a document is only orders from the operational headquarters for managing the counter-terrorism operation in the North Caucasus in Khankala, indicating the exact number of days.
When this process began several months ago, the total number of plaintiffs reached 70 people (and a total of 200 visited Chechnya). However, only 22 persistent policemen reached a court decision. Their claims were satisfied yesterday in the first place. The court did not consider similar cases of their absent comrades in absentia, but separated them into separate proceedings in order to return to them in the near future. True, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was excluded by the court from among the defendants: its lawyers managed to prove that the Ministry of Internal Affairs transferred the “fighting” money down the chain of command without delay.
The Moscow riot police fighters preferred to fight for their material interests on their own, without lawyers. Human rights activists did not help them either.