MOSCOW—On July 20, the leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, decked himself out with automatic weapons and took to Russian state television to deliver a message to the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Kadyrov, who holds a formal position in the Russian government, was peeved that America had put him, his wife, and his daughters on a sanction list for human-rights abuses. On announcing the sanctions, Pompeo said that the U.S. had singled out Kadyrov because of “horrific reports” out of Chechnya “of abuses against LGBT persons, human rights defenders, members of the independent media and other persons who ran afoul” of him.
And so Kadyrov decided to call for revenge. In front of an audience of millions of Russians, he hefted a machine gun in each hand, and declared, “Pompeo, I take [up] the fight. What comes next will be more interesting.”
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“My people will back me up,” he added.
While it’s unlikely Kadyrov could hit Pompeo or the Trump administration directly, the Chechen leader has been known to make good on threats of violence. A few years ago, he went on Chechen state television to say one of his enemies was likely to be rubbed out soon—perhaps by another hitman, but only if “we don’t get to him first.”
Perhaps Kadyrov was just letting off steam. But the man targeted in this tirade, a Ukrainian nationalist politician, later narrowly survived a bombing and is now in hiding in Europe.
And there’s always a risk that Kadyrov’s call for a fight with Pompeo might be “misinterpreted” by his violent followers, says Sergei Markov, an analyst close to the Kremlin. "Some insane radical people, faithful to Kadyrov, could misinterpret Kadyrov's message and attack Americans not only in Russia but all over the world.”
“If I were the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, I would recommend American citizens to be careful," Markov added.
Sometimes called President Vladimir Putin’s attack dog, Kadyrov commands a formidable force of former guerrilla fighters who, like him, switched sides after the Chechen wars of the 1990s. When Kadyrov says a few words condemning a journalist, a human-rights activist, an LGBT citizen, or a politician, all too often real violence follows. He likes to describe himself as “a Soldier of Our Great Leader Vladimir Putin,” capitalizing every word.
There is a long record of assassination attempts and murders that trace back to Chechnya. They include the murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in her house in Moscow, the abduction and murder of the human-rights activist Natalia Estemirova in her home town in Grozny, the abduction and torture of exiled Chechen politician Said-Emin Ibragimov in Strasbourg, the murder of Kadyrov’s former bodyguard Umar Israilov in Vienna, and the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow.
Most recently, a Kadyrov critic, Mumikhan Umarov, was murdered in Austria. In an eerie new update to that killing, four of Umarov’s relatives asked Kadyrov for forgiveness on Wednesday, publicly declaring they had done the deed—killed their own kin—because he was an enemy of Chechnya. (Many generations of Chechen men pay vendettas, or blood feuds that are a part of the region’s traditions.)
Chechens live with constant fear of insulting Kadyrov. Ever since he declared that there are no gay men in Chechnya, relatives have been publicly denouncing any family member who comes out.
Indeed, Kadyrov often insists that the country demonstrate its loyalty to him and his agenda. Five years ago, when he named the Parisian satirical publication Charlie Hebdo an enemy of the Chechen people for insulting Islam, the Chechen interior ministry mobilized, on short order, hundreds of thousands of people (out of a country of 1.3 million) for a protest against the magazine.
Today, the new target is Mike Pompeo and the Americans. “Acting from the dictator’s handbook, Kadyrov makes the entire nation stand by his side, as one,” the chairman the Memorial Human Rights Center, Oleg Orlov, told The Daily Beast. “Every [public] employee now has to post at least six times a week to attack ‘idiot Americans,’ LGBT advocates, bloggers and of course us, human-rights defenders.”
Kadyrov, the 43-year-old leader, rose to his position of extreme power after the wars in the 1990s. He was a guerrilla soldier fighting Russia who could barely speak the Russian language. But then his family switched sides, and Putin appointed Kadyrov as leader of Chechnya 13 years ago. Since then, he has lived a life of an Ottoman pasha, his critics say, surrounded with his faithful fighters, enjoying expensive cars, pet tigers, racehorses and marble palaces, decorated, of course, with Putin’s portraits on the walls.
All of it documented on social media where he posts pictures in his trademark khaki tracksuits, camouflage hoodies and baseball caps posing with semi-automatic weaponry or domesticated wildlife.
In one of my interviews with Kadyrov, he said he wanted Putin to be the president for as long as he lived. “I love him very much, as a man loves a man. He is a man of his word; he brought peace to Chechnya,” he said. “Those who criticize Putin are not human, they are my personal enemies. As long as Putin backs me up, I can do everything—God is Great!”
Putin, who is now allowed by law to stay in power for 16 more years, continues to back up Kadyrov. “I don’t think that the U.S. sanctions against Kadyrov and his family will stop the violence, murders of LGBT [citizens] or his critics,” Orlov told The Daily Beast. “The West should tell Putin: Kadyrov is you, he is a part of your system.”
A few years ago Kadyrov was a popular blogger with more than 3 million followers on Instagram. Facebook has been blocking Kadyrov’s accounts since he was placed on the sanctions list of the Magnitsky Act in 2017. Now, as a result of the Pompeo’s sanctions, his wife and daughters won’t be able to use their Instagram accounts, either.
Meanwhile, it seems the number of Kadyrov’s critics is multiplying by day. Blogs by Kadyrov’s critics go viral on YouTube: at least 300,000 followed video posts by Tumso Abdurakhmanov, a Chechen blogger based in Sweden who last February survived an assault by a man wielding a hammer.
