Ramzan Kadyrov, close ally of President Vladimir Putin and authoritarian head of Chechnya, Russia’s restive Caucasian region, spoke with Ukrainian prisoners of war in meetings heavily promoted in state-controlled media, and in one Wednesday exchange offered his own pistol to a Ukrainian service member so he could kill himself.
The images were made public in video aired by Russia’s state-controlled TASS news agency, local Chechnya media platforms, and Kadyrov’s personal Telegram channel, among others.
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A Ukrainian drone strike had some six hours earlier hit and damaged a barracks used by the Chechnya paramilitary special police unit Akhmat, a formation loyal to Kadyrov and with the day-to-day mission of repressing local dissent.
The multimedia content flurry seemed calculated to message to viewers and content consumers that the Kadyrov regime control of Chechnya is total and unchallenged, that Ukrainians are the enemy and inferior to Chechens and Russians.
In images first aired on Chechnya’s Kadyrov-controlled regional news channel on Wednesday evening, and repeated by the independent SOTA news channel, Kadyrov appeared live on TV with 12 Ukrainian prisoners of war. In a mostly one-way conversation with one Ukrainian soldier, Kadyrov accused him of cowardice and suggested he should die.
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“I will give you a pistol right now, and you can shoot yourself. You don’t want to? There’s a war! People are getting killed. You went out to go and kill people. To die there,” Kadyrov said. Russian state media commonly blames Ukrainians and their decision to take up arms and resist, rather than submit peacefully to Russian invasion and accept Kremlin rule, for the worst war seen in Europe since World War II.
“I’ll give you a pistol, you can shoot yourself, you can die a hero. No? You don’t want to? Look, this guy wants to go kill people, but he doesn’t want to die himself. That’s not the way things are. In war people kill and they get killed.”
The soldier was off-screen and spoke Russian.
Video made public earlier in the day showed a burly Kadyrov smiling and leading a group of Ukrainian prisoners to shout collectively “Russia!” during meetings in a Grozny prison. The all-male group wore pieces of military uniforms and track suits. Kyiv Post review of the video identified at least 60 men in the video shown to be prisoners. Kadyrov content creators and bodyguards also were visible.
Kadyrov asked Ukrainian soldiers if they had sufficient food and if living conditions were acceptable. In the state-controlled images, the Ukrainians answered affirmatively.
Kadyrov suggested that the Ukrainian prisoners should not be held in a closed prison but deployed to state facilities across Chechnya as human shields. By Geneva Convention rules, using prisoners of war as human shields is a war crime.
“It looks like you guys have just arrived here from a vacation. We need to put these guys to work in construction, so that there can be video made of them working for the American satellites. We should put them at all the sites. Let them protect those sites,” Kadyrov said.
Russia is a signatory to the Geneva Convention. However, in 2019 Russian President Vladimir Putin renounced an article of the agreement extending Geneva protections to combatants not serving with the armed forces of a recognized state. The move effectively ended Kremlin acknowledgement of an obligation to treat Ukrainians captured in combat as Geneva-protected prisoners of war, because Russia has considered Ukraine’s government illegitimate since 2014.
One soldier answering Kadyrov’s questions said he had been held in the prison almost for two years and wanted to go home badly. Kadyrov told the group Chechens are fierce fighters and “that goat-devil [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky had tricked you guys” into fighting against Russia, which wants peace with its neighbors.
Following a Ukrainian drone strike hitting a Chechnya security facility used to train special police in the town of Gudermes, Kadyrov on Oct. 29 accused Ukraine of committing war crimes against Russia and Chechnya and vowed retaliation.
The Wednesday strike hitting the police barracks in Grozny marked the first time a conventional war attack had hit the Chechnya capital since Russian forces captured the city and destroyed jihadist-nationalist resistance in 2003.
In the early months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 Kadyrov sent thousands of special police to support Russian assaults and, according to early Kremlin planning, to suppress Ukrainian civilian resistance in conquered territories. Those units, widely called “Kadyrovtsy” fared poorly in conventional combat against Ukrainian regular army forces and armed civilians defending their homes and families.
After changing sides from anti-Kremlin forces to become an outspoken support of Putin and Russian imperialist policies in 1999, Kadyrov, backed by special police units like Akhmat, has been ruthless in repressing dissent in Chechnya.
Kadyrov’s father, Akhmad Kadyrov, had led jihadist, pro-independence forces during the First Chechnya War of 1994-96. He turned coat, however, and shifted loyalty to Russia during the Second Chechnya War, which began in 1999 and continued as an insurgency well after the elder Kadyrov was assassinated in 2004, paving the way for his son Ramzan to take power.
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