A space commission concluded "beyond any doubt" that Vasily Tsibliyev and Alexander Lazutkin caused the damaging June 25 crash, according to Valery Ryumin, the Russian coordinator of the Mir-NASA program.
The collision occurred during the practice docking of an unmanned robot spacecraft to the aging space station.
"Personally, we felt pity for the boys, but the facts remain," Ryumin told the ITAR-Tass news agency. "Most likely we will have to fine them."
Russia has a history of rewarding and punishing its cosmonauts financially, with cosmonaut Gennady Strekalov saying he was stripped of some benefits for refusing to make an extra spacewalk from Mir in 1995.
The space program has an elaborate bonus system that includes not only hazardous-duty pay, but specific payments for such tasks as spacewalks and manual dockings. For example, Russians earn an extra $1,000 for each spacewalk.
American astronaut Michael Foale, who remains aboard Mir, was the third member of the crew at the time of this summer's accident.
However, he - like other visiting astronauts - is not usually involved in operating or maintaining Mir.
Lazutkin and Tsibliyev returned to Earth after the crash, which tore open the hull of one of Mir's modules and cost the space station about half of its power for weeks.
The conclusions of the commission, which Ryumin said signed off on its report yesterday, are unlikely to put all questions about the collision to rest.
Skeptics could argue that Russia has a vested interest in finding that technical problems aboard Mir - a cash cow for their struggling space program - did not cause the collision.
"It has been a longtime tradition here in Russia to look for scapegoats," Tsibliyev, the Mir commander, said after returning to Earth on Aug. 14.
A news anchor for Russian Television noted that the Mir was plagued by breakdowns throughout the crew's six-month mission. "Such a categorical conclusion that the crew is to blame sounds rather strange," he said in a brief commentary yesterday.
Ryumin, who also is deputy director of Energia - the company that built the Mir and oversees it - said the finding was reached after a thorough examination of flight data. But he would not specify in the interview what error the crew made.
It's not even certain the decision will stand. The head of the Russian Space Agency's manned flights program, Mikhail Sinelshchikov, told ITAR-Tass later that the commission has yet to make a final decision and another panel could still overturn it.
A spokesman at Russian Mission Control said ground controllers were unaware of the decision. A call to Ryumin went unanswered.
This summer's near-calamitous Mir accident occurred during a practice manual docking. Tsibliyev was guiding a 7-ton supply ship toward its port by remote control when it started coming in too fast, banging into the Spektr laboratory module and puncturing its aluminum hull.
The Spektr had to be sealed off, causing the Mir to lose nearly half its power.
Some theorized that the Mir crew accidentally stuffed too much garbage into the cargo ship. One Russian newspaper, citing an unidentified source, claimed Tsibliyev failed to properly record in Mir's computer the extra weight on the cargo ship.
Reports in other Russian papers seemed to exonerate the crew - saying that several highly experienced space pilots also "crashed" the ship in later computer simulations of the incident.
Officials at the Russian Space Agency had said an inquiry couldn't determine what happened until the men came back to Earth. But a week before their return, President Boris Yeltsin - presumably briefed by space officials - said it looked like a case of human error.
Tsibliyev and flight engineer Lazutkin apparently anticipated such a verdict. Following their return, they blamed the collision on the 11-year-old Mir's run-down equipment and expressed bitterness at being found at fault by Yeltsin and the media.
Tsibliyev said he couldn't explain why the cargo ship spun out of control, only that "there is no specific person to blame."
The Mir's current crew was busy yesterday preparing for a spacewalk this weekend in which they will try to find and patch holes in the damaged Spektr.
Mir's current commander, Anatoly Solovyov, and Foale put on special space suits to simulate conditions for Saturday's nearly six-hour spacewalk.
The mission is expected to be the first in a series of spacewalks needed to spot and patch holes in the Spektr.
Solovyov and Mir's engineer, Pavel Vinogradov, failed to find any holes during an Aug. 22 mission into the damaged module, but they did manage to reattach power cables that have helped restore the Mir's energy supply.