Chechen Leader at the Gates of Kyiv
Ramzan Kadyrov, the brutal leader of Chechnya, has joined the fray in Ukraine. Ukrainians would like to see him unhorsed, but so too would many Russians.
News that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader with a reputation for extreme brutality, was on the outskirts of Kyiv with several thousand battle-hardened fighters has spread across Ukrainian social media.
"The other day we were 20 kilometres from you Kyiv Nazis, now we are even closer," Kadyrov wrote on his Telegram channel at the weekend.
Residents fleeing the suburb of Bucha reported Chechens machine-gunning cars of fleeing civilians, even those who had placed placards with children written on them in their windscreens.
The arrival of the Chechen strongman, who claims to lead a force of 10,000 of his countrymen, will have sent shivers down the backs of some of the Ukrainian volunteers defending their city.
When the Chechens intervened in eastern Ukraine during the fighting in 2014 they gained a reputation for extreme cruelty.
"There were stories of Kadyrov's guys castrating prisoners of war," a Ukrainian woman with family still living in the Donbas told me yesterday.
But for the Russian generals tasked with crushing Ukrainian resistance Kadyrov's arrival will also have been met with mixed feelings.
They have an acrimonious relationship with the Chechen leader stretching back nearly two decades.
The first time I came across the Kadyrovtsy - as Kadyrov's fearsome cadre of fighters is known - brought home just how fractured that relationship is.
I was on an olive-green armoured personal carrier in a Russian army uniform, hair clipped to a regulation five millimetres, outside the Chechen capital Grozny.
Around me - weighed down by heavy-duty flak jackets and green titanium helmets - was a combat patrol group from the Russian special forces, the Spetsnaz.
In front of us lay the cratered and shell-spattered remains of the Chechen capital. At a makeshift checkpoint the APC stopped with a shudder throwing up clouds of dust.
The soldiers around me each fed a bullet into the breech, then they pulled down their metal face guards, locking them in place with a click.
Two sleek-nosed helicopter gunships clattered low overhead, flares arcing from their haunches to protect against ground-launched missiles.
Mokry, a nickname, was the commander of our patrol group. Muscles bunched with tension, he barked an order. The soldiers leaped from the APC and ran for the cover of the surrounding scrub.
There they lay or knelt on one knee, assault rifles to their shoulders, fingers on the triggers, tense as piano wires. Two hundred yards away a white Lada with blackened windows rolled to a halt.
"That's them - the Kadyrovtsy," Mokry said to me. "They are supposed to be our allies but if we so much as blink, they'll f*ck us up."
The men in the white Lada were - in the eyes of many Chechens - turncoats.
During the first Chechen War, between 1994 and 1996, they fought against the Russian Army, part of a determined national resistance that left an estimated 5,700 Russian soldiers dead on the battlefield.
But when Putin came to power in 2000 the group then led by Akhmad Kadyrov, Ramzan's father, went over to the Kremlin.
Financed by Moscow and backed up by the firepower of the Russian Army they took on rival Chechen clans, eliminating them one by one.
But they also slowly began to edge out the Russian military and the powerful FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, who had been taking a huge cut on the reconstruction contracts in the war-shattered republic.
Even though the Kadyrovtsy were now blessed by Putin, the military never forgot their earlier role in killing Russians. And they especially resented their special status and generous funding from Moscow.
"If they so much as twitch a muscle, shoot the f*cking lot of them," the Spetsnaz commander, a large man with a huge head that the soldiers called "grandfather", had told his men that morning as we set out on the patrol.
It took years to crush his opponents but today Ramzan, who is still only 45, has unrivalled power in Chechnya. He runs the most oppressive regional regime in Russia, persecuting and killing political opponents, human rights advocates, and homosexuals.
Not long after my first meeting with the Kadyrovtsy I drove to the tiny village of Tsenteroi in central Chechnya and interviewed Akhmad, Ramzan's father, at his home.
He was a gruff man and exuded a sense of violence, the fiercest wolf in a pack that had survived for 200 years on the violent southern edge of the Russian empire.
A few weeks later Akhmad was killed by a bomb placed under his seat at a stadium. I returned to Tsenteroi during his wake, the only foreigner among many dozen Chechen tribal leaders who had come to offer their condolences.
Kadyrov senior was probably killed by Chechen rebels. But rumours swirled that the FSB or the military had had a hand too.
A few days later Ramzan, then only 27 and visibly bereft, flew to Moscow. Wearing a tracksuit he was comforted by Putin and annointed to lead in his father's stead.
In the intervening years Kadyrov rebuilt Grozny in his own image - garish, flashy and overtly Islamic.
He is rumoured to have been behind the killing of a number of Russian opposition figures including the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the political leader Boris Nemtsov.
Kadyrov has never hidden the fact that his first - perhaps only - loyalty is to the man in the Kremlin. This week he referred to himself as Putin's foot-soldier.
Back in Chechnya social media flowed with comments condemning Kadyrov's role in Ukraine, though they were soon taken down by moderators.
But if Kadyrov has critics at home, he also has enemies abroad - and not just on the opposing side.
Putin may be urging him on - but there will be plenty of Russians only too pleased if the Chechen warrior is unhorsed.
A version of this article is appeared on the Spectator website. Please feel free to comment, ask questions and engage.
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