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Chechen leader Kadyrov 'threatens whole of Russia', opposition warns Chechen leader Kadyrov 'threatens whole of Russia', opposition warns
(about 3 hours later)
The Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, is a ruthless and corrupt leader who could pose a threat to the whole of Russia, according to a report by the Russian opposition. Vladimir Putin’s handpicked leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, is a corrupt and merciless dictator whose growing political ambitions pose a serious danger to Russia’s future, a damning opposition report alleged on Tuesday.
The report – written by prominent opposition figure Ilya Yashin and entitled National Security Threat – alleges that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has allowed Kadyrov to turn Chechnya into a personal fiefdom beyond the control of the central authorities. The 65-page report, called A National Security Threat, was presented in Moscow by its author, Ilya Yashin, a close friend of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and a leading figure in his RPR-Parnas political party. Nemtsov was killed while walking with his girlfriend across a bridge near the Kremlin in February last year.
“We are opposing a corrupt, dangerous regime that poses a threat to Russia and Chechnya,” Yashin said at a press conference, which police tried to break up after a bomb warning. Alongside allegations of secret prisons, routine-vote rigging in favour of Putin, and the plunder of Russia’s national budget, the report also details Kadyrov’s possible involvement in a spate of apparently politically-motivated killings of journalists, human rights activists, and political opponents, including that of Nemtsov.
“Today’s regime in Chechnya you can describe as a personal rule.” Yashin’s report also questions why Putin has allowed Kadyrov to assemble a 30,000-strong, heavily-armed private army, commonly known as the Kadyrovtsy.
Kadyrov has already been criticised for rights abuses during his oppressive rule in Chechnya. He rose to power following the assassination of his father, Akhmad Kadyrov, in 2004. “If we stay silent, one day we will wake up and the Kadyrovtsy will control Russia,” Yashin warned at Tuesday’s presentation, which took place at RPR-Parnas’ central Moscow headquarters, just a short walk from where Nemtsov was gunned down almost a year ago.
While Kadyrov denied any links to Nemtsov’s murder, he was quick to praise the suspected gunman, a former Chechen policeman named Zaur Dadayev, as a “genuine Russian patriot”. Putin awarded Kadyrov a state honour shortly after Nemtsov’s death.
Related: Putin’s closest ally – and his biggest liability | Oliver BulloughRelated: Putin’s closest ally – and his biggest liability | Oliver Bullough
Kadyrov Jr, a former rebel fighter who officially took office in 2007, dismissed the report as “nothing more than chatter” in an online post. “I have no doubt that Kadyrov was behind the murder of Nemtsov,” Yashin told the Guardian in an interview before Tuesday’s presentation. “I’m not sure if he was the last link in the chain, but I have no doubt of his direct involvement. No one in Chechnya would have dared carry out such a high-profile killing without his approval, at the very least.”
Its release comes just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in central Moscow. Supporters of the Kremlin critic have blamed his death on Kadyrov’s allies. “Putin has created a problem that he does not know how to solve,” Yashin added. “Chechnya today is a quasi-Islamic state within the Russian federation that does not obey Russian rules, and whose only connection with the federal authorities is the systematic receipt of money from the federal budget. Russian society stays silent because people are afraid of Kadyrov. And he exploits this fear as an instrument to muffle critics.”
Five Chechen men – including a deputy commander of an interior ministry battalion – have been charged with carrying out a contract hit on Nemtsov on 27 February 2015, but no organisers have been detained. Suspected pro-Kadyrov activists twice attempted to disrupt Tuesday’s presentation. One lunged at Yashin, screaming “Kadyrov has done much more for Russia than you, bastard!” while another threw a pile of fake dollars. Russia’s beleaguered opposition frequently faces accusations that it is in the pay of the western intelligence services.
Yashin, a close ally of Nemtsov, said he collated the report from open-source material in a bid to show that Kadyrov’s rule in Chechnya now poses a threat to the whole of Russia. Both men were bundled away by security guards. Shortly after, police began evacuating the building, citing a bomb threat. Yashin initially refused to leave, and accused police of acting on orders to close down the opposition event.
Moscow fought two brutal separatist wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s, but the region has now returned to relative stability under Kadyrov’s iron grip despite a lingering Islamist insurgency. While Yashin’s much-anticipated report is drawn mainly from open sources, this is the first time such a well-compiled and thorough examination of the Chechen strongman’s alleged rule of terror has been made public.
But Yashin said that Putin’s policy of giving Kadyrov a free hand in Chechnya in return for an end to all-out fighting now threatens to blow up in the Kremlin’s face. Kadyrov, a 39-year-old former separatist fighter, has been the de facto ruler of Chechnya since 2004, when his father and the republic’s then president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed in a bomb attack in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Kremlin critics allege he has since been given free rein by Putin to run the volatile mountainous republic as a generously-funded personal fiefdom in return for suppressing separatist and Islamist forces there.
“Putin has put a time bomb in place in Chechnya that could lead to a third Chechen war or some other crisis,” Yashin said. Related: Chechen leader's show of strength muddies loyalty to Putin
The opposition estimates that Kadyrov now has some 30,000 fighters – nominally under the control of Russia’s interior ministry but actually loyal only to him – under his personal command. But while Kadyrov frequently professes his personal devotion to Putin, there are concerns that Moscow’s hold over the republic is weakening. Last year, Kadyrov ordered Chechen security forces to “shoot to kill” if they encountered police officers from other Russian regions on the territory of the republic. He later retracted his comments.
Kadyrov has recently sparked outrage with a string of public threats against prominent Kremlin critics. Kadyrov attempted to laugh off Tuesday’s report as “nothing but idle chatter” and even posted it on his many social network accounts ahead of its official release on Tuesday morning. The Chechen leader reportedly gained access to the report after an opposition website mistakenly published it early.
Earlier this month Kadyrov posted a video of former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the leader of opposition party Parnas, targeted in the sights of a sniper rifle along with his deputy. The report comes after a series of threats issued by Kadyrov and his allies towards opposition figures. Earlier this year, Kadyrov called Putin’s opponents “jackals” and “enemies of the people,” and suggested they should be committed to psychiatric hospitals. He also posted a video on Instagram that depicted Mikhail Kasyanov, the RPR-Parnas co-leader and former prime minister, in a sniper’s crosshairs. Days after that incident, Kasyanov was assaulted in a Moscow restaurant by suspected Kadyrov loyalists.
Last month, the Chechen leader penned a lengthy diatribe against Putin’s critics in the pro-Kremlin daily Izvestiya, calling them a “gang of jackals” who “dream of destroying our state”. Despite what he said were concerns about his personal safety, Yashin insisted he would continue his public opposition to both Putin and his Chechen protege, Kadyrov.
“If I said I wasn’t afraid of anything, then this would be false and mere bravado,” he said in the interview with the Guardian. “But we have to keep fighting. If we don’t, the only other option is to leave Russia. And I have no intention of leaving.”