Foreign Wars and conflicts

Video of the head of the militia at war on Russia's side "I'm alive"

"I'm not going to die": Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of the Chechen military in Ukraine, denies the disease

Images on Kadyrov's social media show him smiling, dispelling rumors of serious kidney problems: he wears a medical device on his finger. Its decisive soldiers on many fronts of the conflict against Kiev from the beginning

16/03/2023

Telegram

A video circulated on Russian social media to dispel "doubts", instilled by "Western propaganda" shows the leader of the Chechen soldiers, Ramzan Kadyrov, flaunting smiles and decisively denying rumors about his alleged serious health problems: "I am alive and in full health". The soldier - who has supported Putin's special operation since the beginning in a massive way with professional soldiers on the ground in Ukraine - wears a medical device on his finger, precisely to deny the rumors that he was suffering from a serious kidney disease.

Son of former president Akhmad Kadyrov, installed in 2000 by Putin at the end of the second Chechen war and assassinated four years later, the bloodthirsty Kadyrov would have been among the very few in the inner circle of the Russian president to know in advance of plans for a large-scale attack on the neighboring country, on February 24, 2022.

It is not known exactly how many soldiers Kadyrov sent to Ukraine, but the number would be far from negligible.
According to the first available reports - dated 2022 - they would be from a minimum of 10 thousand to a (unlikely) maximum of 70 thousand units deployed on the Ukrainian front. And in some images from the front, Western intelligence has captured some of Kadyrov's closest advisers, such as Daniil Martynov, a former officer of the special forces of the FSB, the Russian internal secret service, who allegedly trained the Chechen "elite troops".
And it was precisely from the FSB that the tip that allowed Ukrainian forces to eliminate the Chechen commando sent to kill President Volodymyr Zelensky (at the beginning of the conflict) would have come, according to information that was released by Kiev that the Kremlin had not denied with its usual resolve, raising numerous questions.

What is certain is that the "Kadyrovtsy" played an important role in the offensive. According to several American media, in that February where the Russian-Ukrainian conflict began, his militias were involved "in the assault on the western suburbs of Kiev and the crucial airport of Hostomel, on the first day of the war".

Kadyrov is the leader of the Russian Republic of Chechnya, which over the years has become a kind of state within a state where, in many areas, "sharia" applies. The 46-year-old has often described himself as Putin's "infantry soldier." He has ruled this Muslim-majority Russian Caucasus republic with an iron fist since 2011, and has been repeatedly accused by the United States and the European Union of rights violations, which he has always denied. His men - a real paramilitary militia under his command and held responsible for torture, kidnappings and arbitrary arrests - are behind the campaign of persecution against homosexuals, denounced and documented in 2017 by the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and to which Kadyrov responded with the now famous phrase "there are no gays in Chechnya".
Two years earlier, despite the Kremlin's denials, it was assumed that he was directly involved in the death of the opponent and former Russian deputy prime minister, Boris Nemtsov, his great critic and murdered in front of the Kremlin in a crime of which the instigator has not yet been identified.
After the end of the USSR in 1991, Moscow fought two fierce wars against separatists in Chechnya. He has since poured large sums of money into the region to rebuild it and granted Kadyrov a large measure of autonomy in exchange for loyalty and stability.