‘We are very close to you, Kyiv Nazis. Guess where exactly,” Kadyrov said in a video he posted to Telegram on Monday. The recording is said to have been made at the Russian-occupied Hostomel airport, 20 kilometers from Kyiv, where he was meeting with Chechen commanders. It is unclear whether he was actually there. In any case, he was in Grozny on Wednesday, picking up Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Russian National Security Council, at the airport.
Kadyrov, who has ruled Chechnya since 2007 as President Putin’s head of state, has been urging the Kremlin for days on a massive attack on Kyiv to put an end to the Zelensky government. ‘Surrender, otherwise you will be finished’, he threatened Zelensky in the video.
Russian media say that Kadyrov has sent at least 10,000 troops to Ukraine to join the battle as part of the Rosgvardija, the Russian National Guard. Chechen units join the fighting in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists are trying to expand their territory.
But most of the Chechen soldiers sent to Ukraine are on the front near Kyiv. The Chechen commandos have the task, Kadyrov said, to be the first to enter the city to take strategic buildings and get hold of members of the Ukrainian government, led by President Zelensky.
Brutal violence
Opinions differ about the capabilities of the Chechen military. They are known for being tough and extremely loyal to Kadyrov and his patron, President Putin, but their main strength lies in their reputation for using brute force against the population.
At home, the “Kadyrovtsy” are guilty of numerous atrocities. Opposition members, people from the LGBTI community, human rights activists, anyone who does not submit to Kadyrov’s strict Islamic rule is imprisoned, tortured or killed. No wonder many Ukrainians are horrified to fall into the hands of Kadyrov’s troops with their reputation for brutality.
The cynical thing is that the fathers of Kadyrov’s men still fought against the Russians in the two wars that Moscow started at the end of the last century to subdue rebellious Chechnya. The capital Grozny was razed to the ground. For a long time, Chechens were also brought up with the memory of the mass deportation in 1944, when Soviet dictator Stalin had the entire Chechen population deported to Siberia. It was not until the late 1950s that the survivors – it is estimated that half of them perished during the deportation – were allowed to return to their homeland.
But under Kadyrov, Chechnya has become an example of what Putin would now like to make of Ukraine with his invasion: an obedient vassal state firmly in the hands of a Kremlin-approved leader.
folk heroes
In Ukraine, however, there are also Chechen fighters who fight on the side of the Ukrainians against the Russians. In all it is probably a few hundred, at most a thousand fighters, divided into two Chechen battalions. The Sheikh Mansur battalion fought pro-Russian separatists in the southeast of the country as early as 2014 and 2015 from the port city of Mariupol. The majority of the battalion would now be in Kyiv to defend the city against the Russians.
The Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion, named after the Chechen president who was killed by a Russian missile in 1996, also took part in the fighting against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas. Commander Adam Osmaev and his wife Amina Okueva even became Ukrainian folk heroes for their participation in the bloody battle for the city of Debaltseve in early 2015, which ended in defeat for the Ukrainians.
Osmaev initially had plans for a much more personal fight against the Russians, according to Moscow. In 2012, when pro-Russian President Yanukovych was still in power in Ukraine, he was arrested in Odessa for plotting to assassinate President Putin. The plan was to plant a bomb on Kutuzovsky Boulevard in Moscow, along which Putin always drives to the Kremlin. But something was said to have gone wrong during the preparations for the attack in Odessa: one of the conspirators was killed.
Russia demanded the extradition of Osmaev, but he was released after the fall of Yanukovych. The Russians have been hunting him ever since. His wife was killed in 2017 when their car came under fire near Kyiv.
After the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Osmaev called on Chechen mothers on YouTube to stop their sons from joining the Russians. “Have you forgotten that this empire sent you to Siberia?” he asked.