Suicides are on the rise in Russia's demoralised armed forces, the military prosecutor general said Tuesday, adding that over half of the military officials who took their own lives were driven to it by their commanders.
Some 109 people committed suicide in the first half of this year, Alexander Savenkov told reporters, up 38 percent from the first half of last year.
"We can safely say that 60 people were driven to suicide", he added.
Savenkov cited embezzlement as another growing problem plaguing the army.
While no figures are available for the total sum embezzled this year, the losses in the embezzlement cases which resulted in sentences this year amounted to over half a billion rubbles (over 17 million dollars).
According to official figures, over 7,000 army members were sentenced this year on various charges, and the number of crimes within the armed forces is also rising, with 10,000 infractions registered for the first semester of this year. Financing has dropped in the military and morale has been low since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the army bogged down for most of the past 10 years in a brutal war in separatist Chechnya, and Moscow struggling to find funds to replace outdated equipment.
President Vladimir Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin have launched several military reform drives, but analysts say there have been few improvements and that corruption among senior staff still runs deep.