At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chechnya ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, received an assignment from Vladimir Putin. The Russian dictator ordered Kadyrov to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Journalists of The Wall Street Journal wrote about this, citing their sources among the representatives of Ukrainian intelligence and the Security Service of Ukraine.
According to their information, Putin ordered the Chechen warlord Kadyrov to capture the government buildings in Kyiv and kill the Ukrainian president.
Putin developed the war strategy with Kadyrov
The article cites the words of Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, who said that the expected position of president, a high-ranking and desirable task was “a kind of bonus that they assigned to Kadyrov.”
Three weeks before launching the full-scale invasion, Putin called Kadyrov to Moscow to develop a war strategy. On February 25, the Kadyrov troops entered Ukraine with three columns of armored vehicles.
The first of the three groups of Kadirov’s militants was almost destroyed on the approach to Kyiv. The other two were forced to regroup and stop the offensive, never reaching the Ukrainian capital.
Kadyrov started mobilization in Chechnya
After the defeat of his militants in Ukraine, Kadyrov instructed them to start a covert mobilization. The article says that Chechen officials and religious leaders in public places, such as gyms and gaming clubs, offered Chechen men up to 300,000 rubles a month to participate in the war against Ukraine.
It is reported that the “most vulnerable” were recruited. In particular, it concerns men with debts, criminal records, and those considered gay and threatened with imprisonment.
A special relationship between Putin and Kadyrov
Then Kadyrov’s fighters took on a different role – they controlled so Russian soldiers could not escape from the frontlines. Also, Kadyrov soldiers were sent to the captured cities and villages of Ukraine, where they arranged interrogations, brutally tortured locals, and searched them, trying to identify partisans.
WSJ journalists also mentioned Kadyrov’s relationship with Putin. They note that the Russian dictator “for decades spent a huge Russian budget to support” the leader of Chechnya and strengthen his influence in the region.
An anonymous ex-Kremlin official said that Putin communicates with Kadyrov personally and not through aides, as is usually the case with other Russian governors.
