What role is Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov playing in Ukraine war?

Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of Russia’s Chechen Republic, announced his men were deployed to the battlefield just two days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.

Chechnya’s leader has been posting daily updates and footage of Chechen forces supposedly partaking in military and humanitarian tasks on Ukrainian soil on social media since then.

He posted a video of himself in a room full of soldiers on March 14, claiming to be with Chechen forces near Kyiv. The report was not independently corroborated, and Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said he had “no information” about Kadyrov’s presence in Ukraine.

This was not the first time Chechen forces were dispatched to wars in which the Russian army was involved. They also fought in the 2008 Georgian war, the initial phase of Ukraine’s conflict in 2014-15, and the Syrian war.

Observers, on the other hand, claim that despite their reputation as ruthless soldiers, Chechen forces sent to Ukraine have had little impact on the battlefield. Their appearance has been interpreted as a public relations stunt, reflecting both Kadyrov’s political posturing and the Kremlin’s propaganda requirements.

Three years after his father, former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, was slain, Kadyrov rose to power. They fought on the side of pro-independence forces in the first Chechen War (1994-96), then switched sides and assisted the Russian army in defeating them in the second Chechen War (1999-2000). Chechnya thus lost its short-lived independence and became one of the Russian Federation’s regions.

Kadyrov has suppressed political opposition and restricted human rights and freedoms since taking office. He’s been charged with directing torture and extrajudicial executions. Chechnya has been linked to a number of deaths of Russian journalists and human rights activists, notably the killings of Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 and Nataliya Estemirova in 2009, both of whom were critical of Kadyrov.