Chechnya’s Kadyrov Makes Sinister Reference to ‘Beautiful Girls’ in Ukraine, ‘Especially Kharkov’

Chechens
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Vladimir Putin’s Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov made a sinister reference to Ukraine’s “beautiful girls”, particularly those in embattled Kharkiv (Kharkov).

Kadyrov, who has reigned as Head of the Chechen Republic in the Russian Federation since 2007, asserted during a live broadcast that “Ukrainians love me [and] I love Ukrainians” — but that he was opposed to the “shaitans” (devils) who run the country, claiming he was “against them to protect the Ukrainian people.”

“I don’t understand at all how they could dismember the Slavic people like that… Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians. I always thought that it was one people,” he said, according to Chechen media, initially emphasising the fraternal bonds between Ukraine — where the progenitor of the Russian state, Kievan Rus, was born — and its much larger neighbour.

“[We] will restore order there anyway, destroy these bandits. Why does [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky allow such a beautiful state, such beautiful places to be destroyed?” he went on, before adding the somewhat unsettling observation: “Such beautiful girls there, especially in Kharkov… it’s a shame.”

The reference to Ukraine’s “beautiful girls”, particularly in the currently besieged city of Kharkiv, will be perceived by some as an attempt to excite fears about what Chechen invaders in the country might be capable of, with Foreign Policy having previously accused the Russians themselves of “exploiting stereotypes of Chechen brutality” as a form of psychological warfare.

Whether such efforts to use people’s fears of the Chechens, a largely Muslim people who embarked on a jihadist insurrection against Moscow under Boris Yeltsin in the mid-’90s and even invaded the neighbouring, also Muslim-majority Russian province of Dagestan in 1999 — ultimately being crushed by Vladimir Putin with the assistance of Kadyrov and his late father — will terrorise the Ukrainians into submission or stiffen their resolve remains an open question.

The National Guard of Ukraine shared a video last week showing “Azov fighters” — former paramilitaries associated with the controversial Azov Battalion, a volunteer unit now incorporated into Ukraine’s regular forces despite neo-Nazi links — greasing their bullets in pig for for the “Kadyrov orcs”, presumably because pork is considered unclean by Muslims.

Chechnya’s leadership has been explicit in promoting Chechen participation in the invasion of Ukraine on a religious basis, with the Russian province’s Islamic mufti saying that invaders “are on the path of Allah.”

Ukrainian and Western tabloid news outlets have been alive with claims of large detachments of Chechen fighters roving the country trying to hunt down Ukrainian officials marked for death by Moscow or being destroyed en masse by Ukrainian forces, although substantiating evidence for such claims is thin.

Kadyrov, meanwhile, claims that Chechen special forces recently captured the largest military base in Ukraine and put “a whole battalion of nationalists” to flight without a fight, and that his men have suffered very few casualties.

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