Kadyrov is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, who switched sides in the Second Chechen War by offering his service to Vladimir Putin's administration in Russia and became Chechen president in 2003. Akhmad Kadyrov was assassinated in May 2004. In February 2007, Ramzan Kadyrov replaced Alu Alkhanov as president, shortly after he had turned 30, which is the minimum age for the post. He was engaged in violent power struggles with Chechen commanders Sulim Yamadayev (d. 2009) and Said-Magomed Kakiyev for overall military authority, and with Alkhanov for political authority. Since November 2015, he has been a member of the Advisory Commission of the State Council of the Russian Federation.[10][11]
Kadyrov frequently employs totalitarian and repressive tactics in his rule of the Chechen Republic.[12][13][14][15] Over the years, he has come under criticism from international organizations for a wide array of human rights abuses under his government, with Human Rights Watch calling the forced disappearances and torture so widespread that they constituted crimes against humanity.[16] During his tenure, he has advocated restricting the public lives of women, and led anti-gay purges in the Republic.[17][18] Kadyrov has been frequently accused of involvement in the kidnapping, assassination, and torture of human rights activists, critics, and their relatives, within both Chechnya and other regions of the Russian Federation, as well as abroad, through the political use of police and military forces. He publicly denies these accusations.[19][20][21][22][23][24]
Kadyrov has adopted a hypermasculine image in public, frequently posing with guns and military garb or displaying his wealth and opulence.[25][26][27] The Kadyrov family has enriched itself considerably during its rule of the Chechen Republic; the Russian Federation dispenses extensive funding to the Chechen government, while the distinction between the Chechen government and Kadyrov is blurry.[28]
Political career
Deputy Prime Minister
After his father, the then President, was assassinated on 9 May 2004, Ramzan was appointed as the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Chechen Republic on 10 May 2004.[40]
When his sister was detained by the Dagestan police in January 2005, Kadyrov and some 150 armed men drove to the Khasavyurt City Police (GOVD) building. According to the city mayor, Kadyrov's men surrounded the GOVD, forcing its duty officers against a wall, and assaulted them, after which they left the building with Zulay Kadyrova, "victoriously shooting in the air."[41]
In August 2005, Kadyrov declared that "Europe's largest mosque" would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown.[42] He also claimed that Chechnya is the "most peaceful place in Russia" and in a few years it would also be "the wealthiest and the most peaceful" place in the world. He said that the war was already over with only 150 "bandits" remaining (as opposed to the official figures of 700 to 2,000 rebel fighters), and that thanks to his father, 7,000 separatists had already defected to the Russian side since 1999. When responding to a question on how he is going to "avenge the murder of his father", Kadyrov said:
A mutinied commander, , said that Kadyrov "acts like a medieval tyrant. If someone tells the truth about what is going on, it's like signing one's own death warrant. Ramzan is a law unto himself. He can do anything he likes. He can take any woman and do whatever he pleases with her. (...) Ramzan acts with total impunity. I know of many people executed on his express orders and I know exactly where they were buried".[149] On 18 November 2006, Baisarov was killed in an ambush by members of Kadyrov's police on Moscow's Leninsky Prospekt, about two kilometres from the Kremlin.
Movladi Baisarov
On 13 November 2006, published a briefing paper[16] on torture in Chechnya that it had prepared for the 37th session of the United NationsCommittee Against Torture. The paper covered torture by personnel of the Second Operational Investigative Bureau (ORB-2), torture by units under the effective command of Kadyrov, torture in secret detentions and the continuing "forced disappearances". According to HRW, torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya". In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not even attempt to conceal their identity. Based on extensive research, HRW concluded in 2005 that forced disappearances in Chechnya are so widespread and systematic that they constitute crimes against humanity.
Human Rights Watch
a veteran Russian reporter (murdered in 2006) who reported extensively from Chechnya, claimed that she had received a grainy video footage shot on a mobile phone of a man identical in appearance to Kadyrov, and said that "the clips were the murders of federal servicemen by the Kadyrovites, and also kidnappings directed by Kadyrov.[150] These are very serious things; on the basis of this evidence a criminal case and investigation should follow. This could allow this person to be brought to justice, something he has long richly deserved." On 7 October 2006, Politkovskaya was found shot dead in an elevator in her apartment in Moscow. She was allegedly working on an article revealing human rights abuses and regular incidents of torture in Chechnya at the time of her murder.[47] Some observers alleged that Kadyrov or his men were possibly behind the assassination.[151]
On 23 October 2006, a criminal case was registered on the basis of the video tape frames published by the newspaper in Anna Politkovskaya's article. Sergey Sokolov, deputy editor-in-chief of the paper, told the Echo Moskvy Radio that it can be clearly seen in the video as to how "Kadyrov's military forces are beating federal soldiers" with participation of "a man looking like Ramzan Kadyrov".[153]
Novaya Gazeta
German human rights group the , which branded Kadyrov a "war criminal", has alleged that up to 75 percent of recent incidents of murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's paramilitary forces.[154]
Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV)
The group investigator stated in its report: "Considering the evidence we have gathered, we have no doubt that most of the crimes which are being committed now in Chechnya are the work of Kadyrov's men. There is also no doubt in our minds that Kadyrov has personally taken part in beating and torturing people. What they are doing is pure lawlessness. To make matters worse, they also go after people who are innocent, whose names were given by someone being tortured to death. He and his henchmen spread fear and terror in Chechnya. (...) They travel by night as death squads, kidnapping civilians, who are then locked in a torture chamber, raped and murdered".[155]
Memorial
According to the ,[156] many illegal places of detention exist in the Chechen Republic; most of them are run by Kadyrovites. In Tsentaroy (Khosi-Yurt), where the Kadyrovite headquarters is located, there are at least two illegal prisons functioning. One consists of concrete bunkers or pillboxes, where kidnapped relatives of armed Chechen fighters are held hostage while the second prison in Tsentaroy is evidently located in the yard—or in immediate vicinity—of the house of Kadyrov.
International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights
The are often accused of working as a death squad against Kadyrov's enemies. Kadyrov is rumoured to own a private prison in his stronghold of Tsentaroy, his home village south-east of Grozny. Fields around Tsentaroy are allegedly mined and all access routes are blocked by checkpoints. On 2 May 2006, representatives of the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) alleged that they were prevented from entering the fortress.[157][158][159]
Kadyrovites
A video leaked out in which armed men, loyal to Kadyrov, displayed the severed head of a Chechen guerrilla (who was killed in July 2006) for public display in the village of Kurchaloi. They mounted the head on a pipe, together with blood-stained trousers and put a cigarette on him. It was displayed for at least a day as they came back a day later to record it again. On 21 September 2005, a similar incident occurred, as published by Memorial as well as Kavkazky Uzel which described "shocking details" of a special operation conducted by forces loyal to Kadyrov.[161]
[160]
On 1 March 2007, , the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group rights organisation, stated that Kadyrov was "to blame for kidnappings of many innocent people. Their bodies were found later with signs of torture."[162]
Lyudmila Alexeyeva
was assassinated in Vienna on 13 January 2009. Israilov was a former Kadyrov bodyguard, who cooperated with The New York Times, extensively detailing abuses committed by Kadyrov and his associates. Israilov had told Austrian authorities in 2008 that he had been threatened by an agent sent by Kadyrov to drop his lawsuit against the Chechen leader at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.[163] On 27 April 2010, the Austrianprosecutor's office announced that they believed Kadyrov had ordered the kidnapping of Israilov and Israilov had been murdered while attempting to escape. According to the investigation, there was evidence that Otto Kaltenbrunner (adopted name of Ramzan Edilov), one of the suspected kidnappers, had been in contact with Kadyrov personally.[164][165][166]
Umar Israilov
On 15 July 2009, , a member of Memorial society, who investigated the alleged abuses by government-backed militias in Chechnya, was abducted and shot to death.[167] Memorial's chairman Oleg Petrovich Orlov accused Kadyrov of being behind the murder,[168] and claimed that Kadyrov had openly threatened her by saying: "Yes, my arms are up to the elbows in blood. And I am not ashamed of that. I have killed and will kill bad people".[169] Kadyrov denied any involvement in the killing and promised to investigate the killing personally. He condemned the killers, and in response to Orlov's accusations, said: "You are not a prosecutor or a judge therefore your claims about my guilt are not ethical, to put it mildly, and are insulting to me. I am sure that you have to think about my rights before declaring for everyone to hear that I am guilty of Estemirova's death."[170] It was later reported that Kadyrov would be suing Memorial for defamation and slander, targeting Orlov personally with his complaint.[170][171]
Memorial said in a statement on 19 August 2014 that when Kadyrov had lost his mobile phone during a wedding ceremony on 16 August, the police questioned thousands of people who had attended the wedding into early hours of the next morning in an attempt to find it.
[172]
A man who criticised local officials and apparently Kadyrov in a appeal to the Russian President became a target of many threats due to which he had to flee to the neighboring republic of Dagestan. In May 2016, his house was burnt down by a group of masked men and his family was dragged out, put in a car and were thrown under a bridge. His wife also stated that they threatened the other residents with burning down their houses as well if they reported about the matter to anyone. Later, the Chechen police cordoned off his village in order to hunt him down. Kadyrov's spokesman denied these reports were true.[173][174] The complainant later publicly apologised to Kadyrov and accused the media of distorting his remarks in his video complaint.[175] He again fled to Dagestan in November 2016. According to human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, he had to flee after Chechnya's Deputy Interior Minister Apti Alaudinov personally threatened to kill him.[176][177]
YouTube
After Memorial's Chechnya head was arrested in January 2018 over drug possession, Oyub's supporters claimed the charges were fake and were made-up by the Chechen authorities to suppress criticism of Kadyrov.[178] Kadyrov called Oyub a "drug addict" while criticising those working with human rights activists and warned them off from working in his region.[179][180]
Oyub Titiev
On 30 January 2020, , an anti-Kadyrov blogger, was murdered in a hotel in Lille. French authorities have identified the alleged killer as a hitman having connections with the Chechen leader and who had travelled with Aliev in a train from Belgium to France.[181]
Imran Aliev
a dissident Chechen blogger, was attacked in February 2020, but managed to overpower the assailant, who claimed he had been sent by Moscow.[182] Swedish prosecutors stated that the Chechen government was suspected of being involved in the attack.[183]Dagens Nyheter reported on the trial in November, saying the attacker admitted that he was sent by the Chechen government, but had planned to fail. Another arrested suspect denied her own involvement.[184]
Tumso Abdurakhmanov
On the evening of 20 January 2022, Zarema Yangulbayeva ( Musaeva), the wife of Saidi Yangulbaev, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Chechnya, was abducted in Nizhny Novgorod and taken to Chechnya for interrogation. A day later, she was charged with assaulting a police officer. Kadyrov said the former judge's family members would either be in prison or underground and asked the Supreme Court of Russia to "kick out" Yangulbaev from the reserve and "erase his name from the history of the judicial body". Yangulbaev lost his position as a judge in 2015, saying he was forced to do so. Yangulbayeva is the mother of Abubakar Yangulbaev, a Chechen human rights activist and former lawyer for the Committee for the Prevention of Torture NGO.[185][186][187]
née
On May 6, 2024, Abdurakhmanov published a video showing a man burning a car bearing symbols associated with Kadyrov's son Adam in Grozny. Chechen authorities arrested around ninety people from and Shali in response, with Abdullakh Magomadov being tortured to death in relation to the case the case while the death of another person was also believed to be connected to it. Authorities also targeted relatives of those arrested.[188]
Starye Atagi
Social media use
Networks
The number of subscribers to Kadyrov's social networks in 2016 was more than three million people, including three million followers of his Instagram account, according to the Chechen leader's press service. It said that he had 500,000 followers on the Russian VK social network, 760,860 on Facebook, 331,000 on Twitter and 5,447 on LiveJournal. Besides his Instagram postings, it was said that he had also made almost 5,000 on Twitter and 2,300 on VK. The Russian News Agency TASS said that Kadyrov had been "recognized as the most quoted Russian blogger."[213]
In August 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kadyrov had posted nearly 8,000 pictures on Instagram, which made him the online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing, and social networking service's "most prolific political strongman".[214]
The New York Times called Kadyrov's Instagram account "bizarre if strangely compelling",[215] and Newsweek said it was "flashy".[216] In a 2015 article, The New York Times said that Kadyrov was "Instagram-addicted".[217]
The Russian programme director of Human Rights Watch said in an October 2016 article in The Guardian that "even the mildest criticism on social media [is] ruthlessly punished through unlawful, punitive detention, enforced disappearances, cruel and degrading treatment, death threats, threats against family members, and physical abuse of family members." She said that a social worker from a small town in Chechnya made a WhatsApp recording that went viral among Chechen users "imploring" Kadyrov "to look into the plight of ordinary people pushed below the poverty line" by local officials. The article stated that the woman, with her husband, "found herself hauled into the studio of Grozny TV, the state television and radio broadcaster" to face Kadyrov in person, "to apologise publicly for her lies." A "severe and sweeping repression by the local authorities is designed to remind the Chechen public of Kadyrov's total control," the article claimed.[218]
WhatsApp interventions
In May 2015, Kadyrov gave a stern televised lecture to a group of Chechen men and women who were accused of using the WhatsApp messaging service to comment on the impending marriage of a local police chief to a teenage girl some three decades younger than him. The wedding had been widely discussed across Russia on reports that the young woman, Kheda Goylabiyeva, was being coerced into marriage with the chief, Nazhud Guchigov.[217]
"Behave like Chechens", Kadyrov was reported as telling the assemblage of about a dozen people standing in the marbled courtyard of what appeared to be his government palace. "Honor of the family is the most important thing. Don't write such things any more. You, men, keep your women away from WhatsApp."[217][219] In its coverage of the incident, The New York Times reported:
Other issues
Call to quarantine proceeds of horse race
On 3 November 2009, a horse owned by Kadyrov, Mourilyan, came third in the Melbourne Cup winning about US$380,000 in prize money. The leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, immediately called for the Government of Australia to quarantine the prize money until assurances are received as to how the money will be used. Concerns had been previously raised that the Melbourne Cup could be used to launder money by overseas individuals.[226]
Honor killings
In 2009, Kadyrov stated his approval of honor killings of seven women, based on the belief that they were engaging in adultery.[227] In an interview with David Scott of HBO, he condoned honor killings of homosexuals in July 2017 stating, "If we have [gay] people here, I'm telling you officially their relatives won't let them be because of our faith, our mentality, customs, traditions. Even if it's punishable under the law, we would still condone it."[228]
WikiLeaks
On 28 November 2010, the US diplomatic cables leak named Kadyrov as a "starring guest" at some of Dagestan's most elaborate weddings, which indicates the political "Caucasus power structure" in these weddings. In 2006, leaked cables from an American diplomat recounted a lavish wedding attended by Kadyrov in Russia's Caucasus region in which guests threw $100 bills at child dancers, and which had nighttime "water-scooter jaunts on the Caspian Sea", and a report that Kadyrov gave the newly married couple a "five-kilo lump of gold".[58]
Charlie Hebdo cartoons
In January 2015, Kadyrov said he would organize protests if a Russian newspaper published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, saying "we will not allow anyone to insult the Prophet [Muhammad], even if it will cost us our lives." He also stated that Alexei Venediktov "will be brought to account" after his radio station Ekho Moskvy took a survey of readers on whether to publish the cartoons. Venediktov stated he would ask the authorities to intervene against Kadyrov's threats.[229] During a protest rally against the cartoons attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Chechnya, he accused those backing Charlie Hebdo of using "false slogans about free speech and democracy".[230]
After French teacher Samuel Paty was murdered by a man of Chechen descent for showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in his class, Kadyrov criticized the attack, but also told people to not provoke the religious sentiments of Muslims. He also criticized French society for provoking Muslims and stated that the country must have a state institution focusing on inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations.[231] After France's President Emmanuel Macron defended Paty's actions under the right to free speech, Kadyrov on Instagram accused him of forcing people to resort to terrorism by doing so.[232]
Support for polygamy
Kadyrov supports polygamy in Muslim-majority republics in Russia, and believes that Muslims who speak out against the practice are not true adherents to their faith. According to Kadyrov, men legally marrying more than one wife would be more honest than having many mistresses, and would resolve Russia's demographic problem.[233] In April 2018, he stated that all Muslim men are permitted by Allah to have four wives but discouraged having the marriages officially registered. He also denied reports that polygamy would be legalised in Chechnya.[234]
Boston Marathon bombing
After the Boston Marathon bombing, Kadyrov expressed sadness for the victims but denied the suspects had any ties to his region in a statement on his Instagram. He suggested that the suspects were products of American upbringing.[235] Kadyrov accused the CIA of framing Dzokhar Tsarnaev on 18 March 2015, after he was handed a death sentence for the Boston Marathon Bombing and said that they could not have conducted the bombing without CIA's knowledge.[236]
Threats to opposition politicians
On 31 January 2016, Kadyrov posted a video of Russian opposition politicians Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza in the crosshairs of a gun on his Instagram blog.[237][238] In a few days, after multiple complaints, Instagram removed the video prompting Kadyrov to criticize the decision: "This is the much-boasted freedom of speech in America! You can write anything but cannot touch those American dogs, those friends of the Congress and the State Department".[239]
Report by Ilya Yashin
Russian opposition leader Ilya Yashin authored a report against Kadyrov released on 23 February 2016 during a press conference which was repeatedly interrupted by police and hecklers. He also claimed that Kadyrov had murdered Boris Nemtsov. The report titled A National Security Threat claimed that Kadyrov poses a threat to Russia. It included allegations of corruption, authoritarian rule, secret prisons, rigging votes in favour of Vladimir Putin, stealing from the country's national budget to enrich himself, enforcing Sharia law over Russian law, his lavish lifestyle, building and maintaining a personal army of about 30,000 fighters, purported ties to organised crime figures, and his involvement in politically motivated murders of journalists, human rights activists and political opponents.[240][241][242]
The report contained 20 questions which Yashin had invited Kadyrov to answer but was refused. Kadyrov dismissed the report calling it "nothing but idle chatter" and posted it on his social network accounts before its release.[240][241][242] His spokesman filed a request with the Russian Prosecutor General and the Investigative Committee for Yashin to be arrested for the report saying it contained slander and insults against Kadyrov.[243]
List of Heroes of the Russian Federation
Politics of Chechnya
Bullough, Oliver (23 September 2015). . The Guardian.
"Putin's closest ally – and his biggest liability"
Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (1996–2000)
Russia (since 2000)
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