Chechnya’s Kremlin-installed leader Ramzan Kadyrov announced on Saturday that he had revoked an order he issued earlier in the week for Chechen troops fighting in Ukraine not to take any prisoners.
Kadyrov said he had reversed his order, which he made while vowing “severe retribution” for a Ukrainian drone strike on a Chechen military university, after receiving over 2,000 appeals from Ukrainians asking him to cancel it, claiming that both women whose relatives had been called up to fight and mobilised men had urged him to prevent Chechen soldiers from killing Ukrainians who had been “sent to the trenches against their will”.
“To my great joy, those who reached out understand that they are victims of Western cowardice and treachery, and they are being sent to the trenches by European and US politicians, while the leadership of their country are corrupt puppets and fascists”, Kadyrov wrote.
Ukrainian soldiers knew that members of Chechnya’s Akhmat special forces battalions would treat them “humanely” should they be taken prisoner, he added.
On Tuesday, Kadyrov announced that he had ordered Chechen commanders on the front line to “destroy” Ukrainian soldiers following a drone strike on the Russian Special Forces University in the Chechen city of Gudermes, which he eventually claimed had killed up to 10 Ukrainian prisoners of war, despite initially denying that anybody had been hurt in the attack.
“They bit us, so we will destroy them. In the near future we will show them the kind of retribution that they have never dreamed of. We shall not be trifled with,” Kadyrov told journalists at the time.
Tuesday’s strike, which caused the roof of a building on the university campus to catch fire, was the first of its kind to have been officially acknowledged by Chechnya’s authorities, though a Ukrainian intelligence source told news outlet The Kyiv Independent on Tuesday that the drone strike could in fact have been launched from neighbouring Dagestan, another republic in Russia’s North Caucasus.