Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation — on the primary tasks in the new post and the work of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation
In June Anna Tsivileva was appointed Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation. In her position, she oversees the social sphere of the military department — medical care, hospital work, support for fighters and their families, rehabilitation and retraining. In her first interview for TASS in her new position, she identified the primary vectors of work. The Deputy Minister of Defense also spoke about the first results of the work of the Military Social Center of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
— Anna Evgenyevna, in June you were appointed to the post of Deputy Minister of Defense. What tasks are planned to be solved first?
— Indeed, my areas are medicine, social guarantees, payments to our servicemen, housing, military mortgages, Roszhilcomplex.
It became obvious to us, having experience working in the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, that targeted assistance should be based precisely on the interests and requests of the servicemen themselves. Based on this idea, the Military-Social Center of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation was created. It was launched on July 1 in Moscow. To date, 17 thousand people have already come there personally during this period. The main requests relate to payments, obtaining documents, for example, certificates of a combat veteran. Issues regarding the passage of military medical commissions and many, many others are also being resolved. In addition, there are a large number of requests for missing persons. This is a special topic. Of course, they also address personal issues related to housing provision, and some private individual issues related, among others, to health, treatment, rehabilitation, prosthetics. Such a wide range of coverage is provided by the Military Social Center.
In order to improve the mechanism for obtaining documents and certificates by our servicemen, their families, and military pensioners, we are now actively working with the Ministry of Finance and directly making sure that many issues are resolved online, through the public services portal or the MFC.
In addition, I am in charge of the state of military hospitals, their equipment, and the material and technical base. This is one of the areas that now requires special attention. The guys who come to our hospitals with injuries require professional treatment. And now we are actively inspecting hospitals, traveling around our country. We have a program for updating their material and technical base, building new ones, and our task is to have them introduced and completed in the near future, because there is a big demand for this. Therefore, I am paying special attention to this now: I visit and meet with contractors.
In addition, earlier, Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov came up with an initiative, the president supported it, and we have implemented it now. We are talking about the involvement of civilian medical institutions in medical processes. This is very important for routing, for improving the quality of medical care. It is very important for us to create an algorithm and routing of a serviceman. So that when he was admitted and needed emergency medical care, it was provided to him by our professional surgeons, who, of course, are now doing almost the impossible, saving the lives of military personnel.
And in the future, he went through a rehabilitation program, prosthetics and received a comprehensive recovery, including with the work of psychologists, as well as, if required, his training, retraining, future employment, whether he decides to stay or be discharged or demobilized.
To date, 6.5 thousand people have applied for employment. 4.2 thousand have already been employed and have begun, in general, such an active and fairly social life. We understand that there are some problems with personal support — now we are also developing programs for converting to an electronic format, and we had an electronic queue so that everyone also transparently understood how the queue moves, so that this service was available to the servicemen themselves, their family members and for us who provide this service. Therefore, we have a lot of questions and tasks. It's just a huge front of work.
— We are communicating with you on the Army forum. This year, for the first time, you are at it not as the head of the foundation, but as the Deputy Minister of Defense. Which developments are particularly memorable?
— You know, this forum is an anniversary one, it takes place in a special format. Firstly, this is a shorter program - only three days — because time now obliges you to work quickly. Well, despite our busy schedule, we are still here today because the program is so businesslike. We are also studying new technologies, visited the stand of the FMBA (Federal Medical and Biological Agency - approx. TASS), the stand of the Military Medical Academy, where the best achievements, the best developments of our engineers and inventors are presented. And these developments, of course, should be implemented as quickly as possible and put into practice.
I am interested, once again, in the field of medicine. It is now actively developing from a technical and technological point of view. Because new prostheses, endoprostheses, artificial vessels, the ability to perform highly functional, high-tech operations. Of course, this is something that is now on a razor's edge, and our task is to implement and implement everything as quickly as possible in order to save lives and improve the quality of life of our servicemen.
— Now a question for you as the chairman of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation. What are the most frequently asked questions?
— We have received 1.38 million requests in a year and several months of work. This is a very large number. They are mainly related to social support measures — payments, obtaining a certificate, legal assistance. We are also engaged in prosthetics and rehabilitation of demobilized veterans. Private military companies and volunteers are also in our care perimeter as the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation. And it is precisely in these areas that we are actively moving.
We participated in the lawmaking program, we were supported by the State Duma, and we have already begun to issue hand-operated cars to our veterans who were seriously injured. This is done in order to give them the opportunity to actively live, move, work and, in general, travel outside their home. This is especially true for those who live in rural areas. We are currently purchasing 200 cars at the expense of the fund from our domestic automotive manufacturers.
Also answering the question about the methods of rehabilitation of SVO fighters, I would like to note that literally today, within the framework of the Army-2024 forum, we held a round table where we gathered all the leading manufacturers of prostheses, orthoses, rehabilitation equipment, our rehabilitologists, leading specialists of institutes such as the Military Medical Academy, the Russian Academy of Sciences, The Ministry of Health, who are discussing the creation of this comprehensive rehabilitation and prosthetics service. And it seems to me that we have managed to achieve good results in the issue of rehabilitation.
