Kadyrovtsy, the paramilitary under the control of Head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov. Credit: @Kadyrov_95 via Telegram.
When tanks and soldiers belonging to Wagner Group rumbled into Rostov-on-Don on June 24th, the world stood still. Yevgeny Progozhin, a chef turned leader of a private army, had thrown down the gauntlet to Russian president Vladimir Putin, and was vowing to take on Moscow with thousands of mercenaries. Chechen soldiers loyal to the Kremlin were also on the march towards the city occupied by the mutinous army. APCs daubed with the letter ‘Z’ rumbled along the Russian highway, men atop them shouting “Allu Akhbar” and “Akhmat Sila” or “Akhmat is our strength.” Having crossed the border from eastern Ukraine, the armoured column came to a stand-still in traffic at Avilo-Fedorovka and Matveyev Kurgan, a rural province in the Rostov oblast. A dark green and red flag of Chechnya fluttered in the wind as the soldiers waited. The Kadyrovtsy, soldiers loyal to warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, were on standby to go to war.
In the fog of war, what happened next is unclear. Russian sources alleged that some Chechens entered Rostov-on-Don, confronting Prigozhin’s men while Ukrainian sources say some Wagner soldiers were arrested in a show of force. Elsewhere, Wagner Group soldiers swatted aircraft and helicopters from the sky as Russian soldiers prepared makeshift defences around Moscow. With Chechen soldiers converging on Rostov-on-Don from two directions, military sites seemingly falling to Prigozhin’s army and Putin’s warning of dire consequences on national television, civil war seemed inevitable. But by that evening, after a dramatic day, the mutiny had been aborted following a deal brokered by Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, Prigozhin and Putin.
Posturing by Kadyrov followed. On Telegram, the warlord’s favoured messaging app, a text appeared on Kadyrov_95 at 21:52. “I thought some people could be trusted,” the message read. “I talked to Prigozhin and urged him to leave his business ambitions and not mix them with matters of national importance. I thought that he heard me.” The next day, a video was posted showing Kadyrovtsy assembling outside Kolomna, a town 110 kilometres from Moscow, claiming to have been deployed to help protect the city. Bold statements were issued, dramatic music blared and soldiers strutted around with guns. A show of strength had become awkward, a demonstration of loyalty to Putin’s regime after Prigozhin’s betrayal. The ‘Tik-Tok’ battalion which had lumbered to Rostov-on-Don and Moscow was spewing propaganda again as Ramzan Kadyrov looks to replace the disgraced Wagner Group in Ukraine.
“Few places in the world have as long a history of war, resistance and violence with the Russians as Chechnya. ”
The surreal events on June 24th were a stark reminder of how Chechnya’s future is tied to that of Putin’s regime. Precisely how that future is shaped is being decided on the battlefields of Ukraine. For many Chechens, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the wave of atrocities that have accompanied its forces, have reopened old wounds. Few places in the world have as long a history of war, resistance and terror with the Russians as Chechnya.
The small republic of Chechnya, nestled in the mountains of the Caucasus, is a cautionary tale of imperialism. In the Middle Ages, the mountainous people stubbornly fought back against incursions by the Mongols and Ottoman Turks. The Russians eventually subjugated Chechnya in 1859 after several bloody and protracted campaigns. Attempts to absorb the region into the Tsarist Empire failed, and for generations, a long conflict between the Russians and Chechens endured with collective punishment and deportations being meted out on the population. The Bolsheviks were no less merciless than the Tsars. After the Russian Revolution and the fall of Tsar Nicholas II, Chechnya and surrounding territories in the Caucasus made an unsuccessful bid to break away from the crumbling Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks eventually retook the region and later Joseph Stalin would deport the entire Chechen population to Siberia and Kazakhstan during the Second World War, accusing them of collaborating with the Nazis.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechen nationalists moved again. In September, the Chechen and former general, Dzhokhar Dudayev gathered militants and the communist government out of Chechnya. Among Dudayev’s nationalists was Ramzan Kadyrov’s father, Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, a greedy opportunist who had made a bad name for himself extorting Chechen pilgrims on their pilgrimage to Mecca in the early 1990s. Dudayev eventually gathered popular support and declared the independent Chechen Republic of Itskeria. This act was not recognised even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and it was expected that Chechnya was to remain part of the Russian Federation. Chechnya’s oil deposits were integral to Russia’s energy exports and in 1994 trade and access to the region was blocked off with Boris Yeltsin’s government pouring weapons in to fuel the collapse of Dudayev’s failing government where the rule of law was collapsing. The Russians, determined to prevent other parts of the country from breaking away, stepped up their intervention in Chechen affairs.
An attempted coup failed, and the Russian government sent in the army on December 11th, 1994. The First Chechen War ended in disaster. Poorly trained conscripts were no match for the battle-hardened Chechen militias who bogged down the Russian columns, slaughtering hundreds of Russian soldiers moving to seize Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. Thousands of Chechen civilians were killed in aerial and artillery bombardments. Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, who had been named mufti by Dudayev, declared a jihad against the Russians. The guerilla war in the mountains was bloody and eventually the Russians capitulated after Grozny was recaptured but not before Dudayev was killed by two-guided missiles. The Khasav-Yurt Accord was signed in August 1996 and the conflict came to an end. According to human rights groups at least 90,000 perished in nearly two years of war.
Vladimir Putin’s history with Chechnya is no less fraught. The new president of Chechnya, Aslan Maskhadov, was struggling to hold the fledgling state together. The economy was shattered and warlords ruled with the gun, and Saudi Arabia’s money and radical ideologies were pouring into Islamic circles, including militant Salafist and Wahhabist extremism championed by Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda. Religious intolerance, crime and political violence-plagued Chechnya, and Maskhadov wielded little influence.
With the warlords in control and religious extremists imposing Sharia law in parts of Chechnya, many Chechens became disillusioned with the dream of independence. Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov had grown extremely rich since the First Chechen War. Maskhadov had rewarded him with oil tankers and oil wells with which the mufti had built a private army which would form the foundations of the Kadyrovtsy. After falling out with Maskhadov in 1999, who stripped him of his title, and other warlords encroaching on his oil empire, Kadyrov switched sides, along with other Chechens. In Russia, with Soviet revanchism in the air, Vladimir Putin power was rising. The warlords overreached when warlord Shamil Basayev and Ibn Al-Khattab, commander of the mujahadeen, launched an incursion into Dagestan with over one thousand men in 1999.
The Russians responded with a ferocious bombardment of Chechnya and deployed twenty thousand soldiers to repel the jihadists. A string of apartment bombings ripped through Russian cities killing 293 people. The apartment bombings, steeped in controversy, generated widespread anger and revulsion in Russian society, and expert manipulation by Putin gave the rising politician the popular support he needed to escalate the war in Chechnya under Boris Yeltsin’s government. The widespread destruction of cities, fleeing refugees and guerilla warfare became a hallmark of the conflict. Grozny was flattened by bitter fighting and the separatists were eventually driven into the mountains by Russian firepower.
Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov was installed as the head of a pro-Russian administration with Vladimir Putin looking to him to crack down on the Chechen separatists and jihadists with the support of Russian special forces. With Moscow’s support, Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov and his son, Ramzan, unleashed the Kadyrovsty. People were disappeared, tortured and killed in secret prisons as the Kadyrov clan used the civil war as an opportunity to settle scores and wipe out political rivals. Corpses were regularly dumped on the edge of villages and towns to terrorise the Chechen opposition. Some Chechens responded by choosing the path of terror, with Shamil Basayev spearheading a string of devastating jihadist attacks across Russia. Hundreds of people were killed, and in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the United States, the Putin regime garnered much international sympathy as the Western powers struggled to grapple with the new threat of jihadist extremism. The Chechen cause was badly damaged by Islamic extremism and vicious terrorist attacks and Basayev became the most wanted man in Russia. He was eventually killed allegedly mishandling an explosive near the end of the war. Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov did not live to see the end of the conflict. In 2004, an explosion at Grozny stadium killed thirty people, including Kadyrov. Power was transferred to his son, Ramzan Kadyrov and the Second Chechen War petered out after the Kremlin transferred the conflict to the Kadyrovsty. Counter-terrorism operations eventually ended in 2009, formally ending the war in Chechnya.
Ramzan Kadyrov, son of Akhmat-hadji Kadyrov, governs a pro-Russian administration in Chechnya. Credit: @Kadyrov_95 via Telegram.
But for many Chechens, the struggle continued. Jihadists flocked to Syria to fight Wagner Group mercenaries and Kadyrovsty deployed there to shore up Bashar Assad’s regime during the height of the civil war. Kadyrov’s regime hunted down asylum seekers and refugees across Europe, killing those who posed a threat to his power. In Russia, the warlord was allegedly behind the assassination of the journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, and one of his associates was directly linked to the murder of opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov.
In Grozny, Kadyrov ruled through propaganda and fear. Social media became Kadyrov’s tool to project his power and demonstrate Kadyrovsty’s loyalty to Vladimir Putin. He curated his image on Facebook and Instagram, building an audience of 3m followers before being banned from the apps in 2017. He has since switched to Telegram, a popular messaging app, where he still commands an audience of 3m followers on Telegram. 75 million people viewed his account in January 2023 with the leader projecting himself to a global audience.
His bizarre social media antics were a smoke-screen for his depravity and rapacious violence honed during the Chechen Wars. Chechnya is a conservative, traditional Muslim society where sexism and homophobia are intense, rampant and entrenched. Kadyrov tapped into prejudice to shore up his power base. He launched a so-called “virtue campaign” which attacked women’s rights. Contrary to Russian law, the Islamic dress code was enforced. Men targeted women with paintball guns for not wearing headscarves and muftis were installed in streets shouting advice at women about dress and behavior. Kadyrov described women as men’s “property” and publicly condoned honour killings. Horrific anti-gay purges were rolled out in 2017 with the LGBTIQ+ community being a target for detention, torture, rape and extrajudicial killings. This has only intensified since the war in Ukraine began, with LGBTIQ+ people facing stark choices, admitting to a fabricated crime, paying a bribe, or being sent as a “volunteer” to the frontlines to avoid murder or being incarcerated in a secret prison. Journalists and activists covering the atrocities of the Chechen regime have been intimidated, abducted, beaten, and arrested by the Kadyrovsty.
Ramzan Kadyrov's Chechen soldiers on their way to Rostov-on-Don. Source: @lukeharding1968
Bullies in their backyard, the Russo-Ukrainian war has been something akin to a public relations disaster for the Kadyrovsty. Over a thousand of Kadyrov’s soldiers were deployed but were ineffective on the frontlines during the initial invasion, a problem that infected the wider Russian army. “They showed up all wrapped up, pretty, bearded, dressed up,” said Alexander Khodakovsky, a commander of Ukrainian separatists speaking with Al Jazeera. “They had no support means.” In the attack on Kyiv in February 2022, Ukrainian volunteers repelled Chechen columns, embarrassing Kadyrov who had hoped to take part in capturing the Ukrainian capital in Russia’s botched blitzkrieg.
The label ‘Tik Tok battalion’ is no compliment. The Kadyrovsty have proven better at superficial posing and strutting about with weapons on social media than using them against Ukrainian soldiers armed with the latest Nato weapons. In some cases, Ukrainian forces have honed in on Kadyrovsty gloating on social media accounts to geolocate, target and kill them or use information shared to gather intelligence. Embarrassingly, ‘action’ shots of Kadyrov in Ukraine bearing arms were proven by open-source intelligence accounts to be in Russia far from the action. “There are question marks about when these troops arrived to take up position and their capabilities,” said Professor Tracey German, a specialist on the Caucasus at King’s College London. “Even if Kadyrovsty replaces Wagner Group soldiers on the frontline, there are questions about their effectiveness as a fighting force.” As the Centre for Information Resilience’s Eyes on Russia Map shows, Kadyrovsty has largely kept their activities to eastern Ukraine in Mariupol and the edges of Bakhmut, with less than 50 incidents of Kadyrovsty activities being documented close to the frontlines in Ukraine.
“Chechnya’s future is being shaped on the battlefields of Ukraine.”
As in Chechnya, the Kadyrovsty have instead proven more effective at carrying out atrocities on unarmed civilians. In Bucha, Chechens were among the soldiers executing hundreds of civilians with the Kadyrovsty setting up a torture chamber where they even executed their fighters, allegedly killing severely wounded Russian fighters in the local hospital. In July 2022, Bellingcat also identified a Kadyrovsty castrating and murdering a Ukrainian prisoner-of-war in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine. “We know he was in Akhmat because it was publicly documented in a now-deleted video from Andrey Guselnikov's "Investigations and Portraits" series, said Aric Toler, Director of Training and Research at Bellingcat. “Akhmat soldiers, including the fighter who murdered the POW, were at the Pryvillya Sanatorium. We geolocated the footage of the murder to this same location.”
The Kadyrovsty, a paramilitary that fights for Ramzan Kadyrov. Credit: @Kadyrov_95 via Telegram.
The ineffectiveness of the Kadyrovsty stands in stark contrast to Ukraine’s Chechen allies. Hundreds of Chechens opposed to Putin’s Russia have flocked to Ukraine to fight. Others moved to the eastern fringes of the country earlier following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 with volunteers and veterans of the Chechen Wars, the most famous being the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion led by Adam Osmaev. Muslim Cheberloyevski commands the Sheikh Mansur battalion which is composed of Chechen Islamists and Ukrainians who have converted to Islam. Cheberloyevskii has been at war with Putin’s regime for two decades, spending eight years of that conflict incarcerated in a Russian prison where he was tortured by prison guards.
The bad blood between Osmaev and Kadyrovtsy runs deep. Osmaev has long been in the cross-hairs of the Russian government. Born in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, he lived in the Cotswolds in the United Kingdom at a young age before leaving university to fight in the Second Chechen War. After Akhmat Kadyrov’s puppet regime rose to power, his family was forced to flee after his father, one of Chechnya’s most successful businessmen, fell out of favour with Ramzan Kadyrov after an oil deal soured. Osmaev left for Moscow after the war but was arrested in 2007 on charges that he planned to kill Kadyrov. The courts lacked the evidence to convict Osmaev and he departed for Ukraine where he was imprisoned in Odessa after a plot to assassinate Putin was foiled in 2012.
He was spared extradition to Russia by the European Court of Human Rights but was given a lengthy prison sentence. Circumstances changed fast after his trial in 2013. After the annexation of Crimea, Ukraine’s government was short of experienced soldiers needed to fight in its conflict with Russia. Osmaev was swiftly released in October 2014 and joined the Dudayev battalion preparing to fight in the shadow war brewing in eastern Ukraine. Chechens, Crimean Tartars, Ukrainians, and Azerbaijanis swelled the ranks of the Dudayev battalion. Osmaev and his wife, Amina Okuyeva, who fought as a sniper in the unit, made their home outside Kyiv. But the reach of Russia’s intelligence services was long. The commander was gravely wounded and Okuyeva was killed in an attack by Russian secret service agents outside Kyiv in 2017. The Russo-Ukrainian war’s escalation on February 27th, 2022 allowed Osmaev to hit back at Putin’s regime. As Russian forces rolled into Ukraine, he issued a statement. “I want to tell Ukrainians that real Chechens, today, are defending Ukraine,” Osmaev said. “We have fought and will continue to fight for Ukraine until the very end. We will celebrate victory in Moscow, in Chechnya, in Crimea, and Sevastopol. God willing.”
Despite many fighting on the same side as Kyiv, the Chechen diaspora has a complicated history with Ukraine. At least five thousand Chechens fled to Ukraine during the Second Chechen War but the refugees that arrived in Ukraine struggled to get the government to recognise them, forcing many to return to war-torn Chechnya. According to Relief Web, local immigration services had an “unwritten rule” that allowed them to reject many refugees from Russian republics like Chechnya. The official reason at the time was that the refugees were technically Russian citizens and were from a country that respects human rights. Others that weren’t sent back faced the constant threat of being extradited to Russia by the authorities or were tarred as jihadists, radical Islamists or Kadyrovsty by suspicious Ukrainians.
The Chechen soldiers fighting for Ukraine also have a chequered past with Kyiv. During Osmaev’s arrest and interrogation in 2012, he was allegedly tortured by Ukrainian police and special forces who wanted a confession. “They said they would chop my penis off and put it in my mouth,” he said in an interview with The Independent in 2013. “They then covered my head with a plastic bag. They told me they had my father and stepmother as hostages, and they would be arrested if I didn’t confess.” In 2021, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, slapped sanctions on the Sheikh Mansur battalion and froze their assets, an act that threw the fighters' legal status into flux. The Ukrainian authorities had already drawn the ire of the battalion when Petro Poroshenko’s government extradited Timur Tumgoev to Russia in 2019. After fighting for the Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine, the former Sheikh Mansur fighter was sentenced to eighteen years in prison by Russian courts. The Sheikh Mansur battalion, and its leader Muslim Cheberloyevskii, have also continued to face criticism for its ties with Islamist groups.
An all-out war between Ukraine and Russia cooled existing tensions and gave the Chechen cause a new lease of life. “What is happening in Ukraine now, it's the same thing that happened to Chechnya,” one Chechen volunteer fighter said speaking with ABC News. “All these occupations, all these massive graves, all this genocide of civilians.” Where the Kadyrovsty have largely been incompetent on the battlefield, the anti-Russian Chechens have fought in crucial battles at Bakhmut, Kharkiv, Severodonetsk and Izyum, and some fighters have launched ambushes inside Russia. Crimean Tartars - a Muslim minority from the peninsula under Russian occupation - have joined Chechen battalions after years of persecution by Russian security forces. With intensifying attacks on Russian bases in Crimea, they are hoping to recapture the Ukrainian territory from Vladimir Putin’s regime which annexed the region in 2014.
Chechen rebels embedded with the Ukrainian Forces ambush a Russian military truck near the Belgorod/Kharkov border and kill the driver. Source: @IAPonomarenko
For many anti-Russian Chechens, Ukraine is a pivot to bring its war back to Chechnya and loosen Moscow’s grip on the statelet. “This is the Third Chechen War,” one soldier from the Dudayev battalion told Politico. “This time we will win.” A total victory for Kyiv over Vladimir Putin’s regime would be unlikely, even though Russia has utterly failed to secure its broader objectives in Ukraine. The war has deteriorated into a bitter, grinding slugfest, with the bloody battles at Bakhmut, Mariupol and Severodonetsk exacting a toll on fighters on both sides of the conflict. The Ukrainian counteroffensive underway has ground forward but not as rapidly as the Western powers have expected with Russian soldiers deeply entrenched and shredding Ukrainian forces with artillery and airpower.
However, Ukrainian forces have shown themselves capable of sowing chaos across the border with acts of sabotage, bombings and ambushes on Russian soldiers. Supporting anti-Russian insurgents, including Chechens, could sow instability inside Russia. The Wagner mutiny has shed light on how fragile the system built by Vladimir Putin over two decades in power has become, with warlords and ultranationalists squabbling over how to win the war in Ukraine and competing for power in the dictator’s court. Without Putin, some fear Russia could become ungovernable. In 2022, Arkady Ostrovsky, The Economist’s Russia editor wrote, ‘Vladimir Putin’s war is turning Russia into a failed state, with uncontrolled borders, private military formations, a fleeing population, moral decay and civil conflict.’
“If Vladimir Putin falls and Russia crumbles, the unravelling will begin in the Caucasus.”
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s brief seizure of Rostov-on-Don demonstrated how rapidly the situation almost deteriorated when Wagner Group mercenaries shot down Russian pilots and Kadyrovsty marched towards the city. With Kadyrovsty willing to execute and kill wounded Russian soldiers on the battlefield, private armies threatening to march on Moscow, and Ukrainian insurgents and anti-Kremlin Russian nationalists and ultranationalists launching cross-border raids with increased boldness, Russia could unravel at its peripheries were Putin to be toppled. This is echoed by some Chechens fighting on the ground, who believe Russia is on the brink of falling apart. It is an opportunity anti-Russian Chechens will seize with commanders like Muslim Cheberloyevskii firmly set on bringing holy war back to Chechnya.
The types of terrorist attacks seen in the 2000s and the brutal guerilla war that typified the earlier Chechen wars could return in the future. The goal of anti-Russian Chechens would likely be to remove Kadyrov from power who will look to shore up his position and maintain stability at home, and build up his army’s combat experience in Ukraine to face down insurgents or an uprising inside Chechnya. The situation is difficult to judge inside Chechnya. Kadyrov’s regime has quashed all forms of dissent and there is no visible opposition to either his regime or that of the Kremlin. Repression has increased following the invasion of Ukraine, as the Chechen (and Russian) authorities have silenced opposition to the war and stifled any opposition to, or criticism of, the government.
After thirteen years of relative stability, would Chechen civilians welcome another civil war and a wider confrontation with Russia? “I think this depends upon what happens in Ukraine,” says Tracey German. “The Russian military performance there has certainly undermined the reputation of the Russian armed forces, but the war has also provided a graphic reminder of the decades of war in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s.” Most would shudder to revisit the Chechen wars so soon after the events exacted such a terrible price on ordinary people.
But history has not been kind to Chechnya. From the fall of the Tsar to the collapse of the Soviet Union, sudden events in Moscow have sent shockwaves through the mountainous statelet. Where the Kremlin made certain that the previous Chechen wars were a Russian affair, a third conflict in Chechnya, and the bloodshed it generates, will be harder to contain if the current Russo-Ukrainian War ends in humiliation for the Russians and Putin’s regime unravels. If Vladimir Putin falls and Russia crumbles, the unravelling will begin in the Caucasus.