War in Ukraine: who are the Kadyrovtsy, the terrifying Chechen troops of Ramzan Kadyrov?


While the Russian offensive in Ukraine does not weaken, no less than 10,000 Chechen soldiers have been mobilized by their president Ramzan Kadyrov, and stand ready to fight alongside Vladimir Putin’s soldiers. Called the Kadyrovtsy, these terrifying troops, reputed to be lawless, are prepared to support Russia at any cost.

“I take this opportunity to advise President Zelensky, until he is the former President of Ukraine, to call our President, Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and apologize,” said the Chechen president in a speech unveiled this Friday, delivered from Grozny, the Chechen capital.

Chechnya, a Russian republic in the Caucasus, has been ruled since 2007 by the very authoritarian Ramzan Kadyrov, extremely loyal to Vladimir Putin who placed him in this position.

Ramzan Kadyrov has since surrounded himself with the Kadyrovtsy, a special unit of several thousand soldiers in black uniform, the only ones to wear this color among the troops of the Russian republic. Their methods, often illegal, consist of intimidating, torturing and terrorizing, while several controversies have smeared the Chechen government over the years.

Interviewed by Le Point in 2015, Oleg Khabibrakhmanov, a human rights activist, returned at length to the climate of terror reigned by men in black in Chechnya.

“These are people who don’t obey the law.” They are heavily armed and have received military-style training,” he said.

On Facebook, in front of the troops mobilized by the Chechen president, the translator of Russian origin André Markowicz had meanwhile affirmed that an intervention by the Kadyrovtsy would have only one objective: to establish a “bloody cloak of terror”.

Persecution of homosexuals

In 2017, the Chechen government had in this context accelerated its policy of persecution against homosexuals, terrorized by the Kadyrovtsy. In a long investigation carried out by the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, we learned that people suspected of being homosexual were kidnapped, tortured and held in secret prisons.

If the Chechen leaders have always denied these accusations, Ramzan Kadyrov had advanced the argument that there were no homosexuals in the country. “It is impossible to persecute what does not exist in our republic,” he declared.

Igor Kotchetkov, founder of the “LGBT Network” association, explained in remarks spotted by Le Temps that homosexuals in Chechnya “think that the Kadyrovtsy can find them everywhere, in Moscow and even abroad”.

Since 2020, President Ramzan Kadyrov has been banned from entering the territory of the United States, Washington accusing him of “gross violations” of human rights in his country.

In a statement, the US State Department said the White House had “a large body of credible information that Ramzan Kadyrov has been responsible for gross human rights violations for more than a decade, including acts of torture and extrajudicial executions”.





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