An unknown number of Rebel Chechen and Tatar Muslims are defending Ukraine and settling scores with the rulers of their homelands.
While nothing much is known about these groups fighting the war against Russian forces, a few factors are evident from their posts made public. Those Facts are;
Their reputation for brutality and ruthlessness in enforcing domestic rule is well-known, and their presence has raised memories of grisly urban combat and guerilla fighting from the Chechen wars in the 1990s and early 2000s.
This group of Chechens has also joined the war — but they intend to defend Ukraine against the Russian invasion.
“Dear Ukrainians, please do not see those people as Chechens,” said Adam Osmayev, an exiled Chechen leader, in a video published on social media, referring to Kadyrov’s soldiers. “They are traitors … puppets of Russia. Real Chechens are standing with you, bleeding with you, as they have in the past eight years,” he said, holding a gun and standing next to three other armed men with masked faces.
Osmayev leads the Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion, named after the late Chechen rebel leader. The group is one of the two publicly known Chechen volunteer groups fighting against Russian-backed separatists and Russian forces in Ukraine since 2014. The other one is called the Sheikh Mansur Battalion and is headed by a commander called Muslim Cheberloevsky. The identity and the exact number of the Chechen volunteers are unknown. But most of them are believed to be people who left Chechnya either after the end of the war there in 2003 or who have escaped Kadyrov’s despotic rule over the past years.
In 2013, the Ukrainian government, then a Moscow ally, imprisoned Osmayev for plotting to assassinate Putin — an accusation he denies. When he was released a year later, he went to the Donbas region to fight the pro-Russian separatists. Both Russian and Western media have reported alleged links between the Sheikh Mansur Battalion and the “Islamic State.”
When Putin’s army began marching toward Kyiv, leaders of both battalions, along with thousands of other foreign volunteer fighters, announced they would continue to defend Ukraine against “their common enemy.” Their determination to assist Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion stems from similarities they see between what Ukrainians are going through and their own fate.
