It’s a calm spring day in Kyiv, free of the air raid sirens warning of impending Russian cruise missiles, when I meet Anzor Maskhadov in a nondescript cafe somewhere in the Ukrainian capital’s southern suburbs. “It’s not so bad here now,” Maskhadov says, pouring himself a cup of tea, a backdrop of traditional Caucasian carpets on the wall behind him. “Back home, during the wars, it was much worse,” he adds.
“Home” is Grozny, capital of the Chechen Republic, now a constituent province of the Russian Federation but the center of a self-declared independent state the last time Maskhadov was there, in 1999. At the head of that state was his late father, Aslan: the last president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria.
The Maskhadovs played a leading role in the brilliant, heroic, yet failed defense of Chechnya against Vladimir Putin’s first brutal wars of conquest in the 1990s. Now, Anzor has brought the mantle of his family’s storied history to the latest Russian imperial battleground, hoping to be of some use as Ukraine makes its own stand against Putin’s war machine.
Anzor is a soft-spoken man, one who clearly commands great respect from those around him, including the half-dozen in his entourage in the cafe. They made the journey from Norway, Maskhadov’s place of exile for the past decade, about two weeks prior.
“We knew we could not just sit and do nothing,” says Maskhadov, describing his decision to come to Kyiv and see Russia’s new war for himself. “We know this evil better than anyone else. We are here to share that knowledge and experience with our Ukrainian brothers.”
Experience with the Russian way of war is something the Maskhadovs have in spades.
Aslan Maskhadov was himself born in exile of a different kind, in 1951 Soviet Kazakhstan, just seven years after Josef Stalin had deported the entire Chechen people to the desolate steppes for allegedly allying with the invading Nazis. The elder Maskhadov became a career artilleryman in the Soviet army nevertheless, before departing for Chechnya soon after it declared independence following the Soviet collapse in 1991.
By 1994, he was the chief of staff of the nascent Chechen Republic of Ichkeria’s armed forces, which would be put to the test nearly immediately. In December of that year, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered his troops into Chechnya to destroy the rebels and reinstate Moscow’s control. The defense seemed a hopeless task: Russia’s national army alone outnumbered Chechnya’s inhabitants.
That was where Aslan Maskhadov’s legend began. Despite it all, he led Chechen forces to a stunning victory over the poorly trained Russian conscripts, forcing Moscow to sue for peace in 1996. He would become president of the de facto state, but Russia was not done: In 1999, at the command of incoming President Vladimir Putin, a new invasion began, this time decimating Grozny utterly and slowly but surely conquering the republic. Aslan Maskhadov was killed leading his troops in 2005.
“It was the cruelest war,” Anzor says of the First Chechen War. “They came to our land saying they are going to ‘restore constitutional order.’ I was with my father all those two years as his secretary and adviser, even when he signed the treaty with Yeltsin. In the end, it did not matter — they merely broke their word and came back [in 1999] and destroyed our land fully.”
When the Second Chechen War began, Anzor was abroad and was never able to return home. His family moved through several countries before settling in Norway in 2006, where Maskhadov continued his dissident activities. Chechnya’s new, Kremlin-backed ruler, Ramzan Kadyrov, sought to silence him numerous times, arresting his relatives back home as part of a collective punishment campaign. Maskhadov claims he learned of a new attempt by Kadyrov’s agents to assassinate him earlier this year, as they have done to other exiled Chechen dissidents in Germany, Austria, and elsewhere.
“They are always trying something. You learn to survive well in this reality,” Maskhadov says with a smile. “This is something Ukrainians are learning now.”
Maskhadov is quick to point out the common themes of Russian campaigns of conquest, such as the complete dehumanization of the Kremlin’s enemies, reducing them to little more than savages and fanatics who must be dealt with lethally.
“We are second-class humans for them, at best,” Maskhadov says. “We are ‘blacks,’ you know, as [people from the Caucasus] are often called in Russian. [Russians] consider themselves the best on the planet — better than Americans or Europeans, let alone us.”
“And yet, today they are talking about fascism,” Maskhadov continues. “That Ukrainians are all Nazis — how are [Russians] different from Nazis? Hitler also had this view — that his people were the chosen ones, Deutschland uber alles. We’ve got another Hitler now, except he sits in the Kremlin.”
There is something of a common history as well, of course. The fall of the Soviet Union saw efforts by the newly independent republics to claw out their sovereignty before what many saw as an inevitably revanchist Moscow would come back for them.
Maskhadov describes recent meetings with his father’s former comrades, Ukrainians who served alongside the elder Maskhadov in the Soviet army and who understood well the shared struggle of their two peoples, saying, “Those people that I talk to today, both Chechens and Ukrainians, they clearly understand what’s going on here.”
“They know why Putin started this war,” Maskhadov says. “They know that he won’t stop here — if he wins this war, he’ll continue to Europe.”
There is one old video to that effect that has seen a resurgence in recent months. In a 1995 television interview, Dzhokhar Dudayev, then the president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria amid the Russian invasion, described Moscow’s appetite.
“[Russia has] started now with Ichkeria,” Dudayev said. “But it won’t sate their appetite. They will bring the war next to Crimea. They will try to return Ukraine to Russia. They will swallow Belarus in the name of ‘Slavic brotherhood,’ then more. There is no limit to their ambitions.”
“Our leader back then told the whole world this,” says Maskhadov, recalling his people’s struggle against Russia with hardly a word in support from the world. “They said to everyone that Russia has a great appetite — they will try and re-create the USSR, to bring all these lands back to them. We warned the world, asked for help many times. We went to other countries, trying to tell them that we are not the terrorists, but they are. But no one listened. And like this, the international community created this monster, Putin, which we have today.”
The Russian appetite has only grown over the past two decades. After finishing with Chechnya, Putin moved next to Georgia, smashing that former Soviet republic’s army in a 2008 invasion. A tepid Western response and a growing sense of destiny emboldened him to move then to Ukraine: first 2014’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbas, then February’s all-out offensive.
Knowing that the support of the world can be fickle, Maskhadov is offering what he can, advising Ukrainian colleagues on Russian war crimes and using his own experience in seeking justice for such acts.
Maskhadov spreads a series of large glossy photographs on the table in front of him. “These are just some of Russia’s crimes in our land,” he says. “From the 2002 report of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, regarding war crimes against civilians.”
The images range in brutality: from photos of mass unidentified graves to several of Russian armored personnel carriers marching Chechen women and children in front of them as human shields to protect from insurgent attack. Some of the images are vividly gruesome.
“Do you know what happened to this man?” Maskhadov asks, pointing to one particularly graphic image. “Russians burned his nose off with a blowtorch while he was still alive. They then cut his head off and kept it as a trophy. We are trying to help Ukrainians understand the depths of what [Russian soldiers] are capable of and to help them build their own criminal cases.”
Maskhadov also acts as a sort of liaison for recruits, though he mostly counsels patience. He says he’s been contacted by “many dozens” of Chechens in Europe who are seeking to come and fight Russian forces themselves, alongside the Ukrainian army.
“I have good contacts with virtually everybody in Chechen society abroad,” Maskhadov says. “From Europe, from other countries, I get messages from people often — from Chechens who fought against Russia in Chechnya who ask how to get to Ukraine to fight Russia there. I ask them to wait a little bit so that we can sort out everything legally for them so that they won’t be committing a crime in their country. We have to respect the laws of the countries we live in.”
There are more than a few Chechens fighting in Ukraine. While the brutal pro-Russian paramilitaries known as the Kadyrovtsy, after Kadyrov, have garnered most of the headlines, there are at least two units of anti-Russian Chechens active in Ukraine as well. The Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion and Sheikh Mansur Battalion, both named after leaders in Chechnya’s centurieslong struggle against Russia, formed in 2014 in the wake of the initial Russian-led separatist uprising in, and then regular invasion of, Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Both remain active today, releasing regular footage of combat exploits and denouncing their compatriots fighting for the country that conquered their homeland brutally for the most recent time just two decades ago.
For Maskhadov, fighting for Russia on the order of Kadyrov — “our very own Quisling,” as Maskhadov calls him — is a betrayal of the many generations before them.
“We try to connect with people in Chechnya itself, to tell them to send their sons abroad so they cannot be conscripted [by Kadyrov’s regime],” Maskhadov says. “I tell them, how can we be friends with Russia after all this? To join their army, then die for them in another country — this is a betrayal of our history, of our people. Kadyrov is guilty of this, the ultimate crime.”
Should Russia succeed in its war against Ukraine, Maskhadov is sure that Moscow will find another Kadyrov to rule in its name there.
“Of course they will do this,” he says. “They have such people already in Donetsk and Luhansk, such ‘mini Kadyrovs’ who sell out their own nation for power. And this is their plan if they capture Kyiv, too. I have said since 2014, since the [Euromaidan] protests here [in Kyiv], that Ukrainians need to learn the story of the Chechen people: how we fought, who we fought against, and what Russia is capable of. This is a country that does not count casualties. In our wars, we would destroy an entire column of Russian soldiers and they would not even care to retrieve their dead — they would leave them to be eaten by dogs. That is the inhuman, shameless power we are both fighting against.”
As the sun starts to drop low in the Kyiv early evening sky, Maskhadov sips his tea and opines about what Russia’s defeat in Ukraine — it’s just a matter of time, he’s sure — will mean for his homeland.
“Russia will lose this war in Ukraine,” Maskhadov says. “It has already been lost. It was obvious from the first days. When I saw the first pictures from Ukraine, with all the Soviet tanks from the ’60s and ’70s, old T-72s and Grad [rocket artillery]. These are all old, old systems. When [the Russians] deployed these to Ukraine, I looked and thought, ‘Where are you going? You will be smashed there. Why? Because here are HIMARS, Javelins, NLAWs, Stinger, and even more sophisticated systems.’ Russia doesn’t have such [advanced] weapons.”
That, he hopes, will lead to an event he has waited more than two decades to see.
“[The defeat] will be a nightmare for Kadyrov,” Maskhadov says with a smile. “It will be the beginning of the end for Putin — and for him. Because without Putin, he is nothing. No one will forgive him for the crimes he has committed against the Chechen people. And one beautiful day, sooner than anyone thinks, he will face justice.”
Neil Hauer is a Canadian journalist writing on Russia and the Caucasus, based in Armenia.
