MOSCOW — Several leading human-rights organizations critical of the Kremlin were forced to suspend operations yesterday after failing to meet a deadline for registration that critics said was impossible to meet.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have riled the Russian government for chronicling state-sponsored human-rights abuses, were among scores of organizations that had to stop work.

The development drew statements of concern from America and the European Union.

A new law requires foreign pro-democracy groups and charities to submit to draconian new measures that critics have claimed was designed to curtail one of the last arenas of free speech still left in President Putin’s Russia.

“There can be no doubt that the government has laid a bureaucratic minefield in our path to make it very difficult if not impossible for us to continue in Russia,” an official at one rights group said. “Whether this is just a warning shot or a taste of things to come, I don’t know.”

The government claimed the NGOs submitted applications only three months before Wednesday’s deadline and denied the procedures were complex or cumbersome. The application form is more than 100 pages long and requires each organization to include details such as the telephone numbers of each employee in their home country. They must also provide copies of every article published in the local and international press that mentioned their work.

The government has the right to veto any NGO programs it feels are not in the interests of the state.

Some 95 organizations are affected and Doctors without Borders, a past winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was forced to halt humanitarian work in Chechnya.

Under the law, those NGOs stopped from working now will be allowed to resume activities if they refile outstanding parts of their applications by January.

Even if the applications are approved, all foreign NGOs must submit detailed financial plans for the coming year — including the names of all people attending any conferences they might organize — by the end of the month.

Since Mr. Putin became president in 2000 most of the press has come under state control, the parliament has become a largely sycophantic rump and large parts of Russia’s vast energy sector have been renationalized.