Chechnya has for two centuries been a thorn in imperial Moscow’s side. Over and over again, its people have revolted against the imposition of Christian Orthodox power and dragged Russia into protracted and bloody conflicts. The first of these post-Soviet conflicts, which ran from 1994 to 1996, saw Russian troops humiliated. Boris Yeltsin, who had staked his reputation on reasserting control over the region, saw his reputation permanently damaged. Worse, Russians themselves were humbled. A decade earlier, they had been vying for global supremacy with Washington. Now, they could not even win a war against a separatist rabble in their own backyard.

When in late 1999 Putin, then a young and straight-talking upstart, stormed into the halls of power, he promised to bring Chechnya back into the fold at any cost. Launching a new war, he sent his troops into the breakaway region with carte blanche to exterminate and destroy. Almost a decade of fighting left more than 50,000 civilians dead and Grozny razed. Widespread criminality — looting, rape and murder — by Russian troops at the front went mostly unpunished.

Into this maelstrom of violence stepped a young Ramzan Kadyrov, one of many former insurgents turned pro-Russian fighters. Appointed by Putin to lead the territory in 2007, his 17 years in power have been characterised by an awkward combination of Moscow-style autocracy, with various strongmen vying for favour while Kadyrov watches on, and regressive Islamism, designed through a combination of misogynism, traditionalist flourishes and militancy to appease and oppress the majority Muslim local population in equal measure.

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But above all, Kadyrov has ruled in the same style as the Russian army conducted its invasion: with criminality and absolute violence. Kadyrov and his henchmen have personally been involved in torture and extrajudicial killings of political opponents and purported criminals. Brutal anti-gay purges have seen hundreds abducted, tortured and beaten — and several killed. Putin and his ally seemed to have found a solution to the age-old problem of Chechen insurgency: a flexible nationalism, ruthless violence and a mafia-like internal politics.

Imagining a post-Kadyrov Chechnya, pundits float bold hypotheses: could Kadyrov’s death provoke a bitter succession crisis that would spark another regional war? If Russian troops had to be deployed, would Putin’s reputation as the man who quelled the restive Chechens for good be ruined? Could rebellion in Chechnya even lead to a wave of revolts across the imperial peripheries, where Muslim minorities have not profited from the past two decades like their ethnic Russian peers and where local populations have borne much of the burden of fighting in Ukraine? If the wrong leader is imposed by Moscow, could demonstrations like those in Bashkortostan — another Muslim majority province where in January several thousand angry locals clashed with security services after a local activist was jailed — break out and perhaps spread? Both Kadyrov and Putin have plans in place to ensure that such disasters don’t unfold, but the situation is flammable.

Kadyrov himself seems intent on a dynastic succession. Two of his sons, the teenaged Adam and Akhmat, are being groomed for power. The 16-year-old Adam has been appointed supervisor Chechya’s Special Forces School, while his 18-year-old brother is the territory’s Minister for Youth and even attended a one-on-one meeting with Putin in 2023. The former shows the same penchant for violence as his father: Kadyrov announced he was “proud” when footage of Adam viciously beating a man who had burned a Koran went viral.

Yet neither of these stripling dauphins, who lack the support of either the public or a force of loyal foot-soldiers, would likely be able to keep control of Chechnya for long. A crowd of potential challengers, such as Kadyrov’s right-hand man Magomed Daudov, another Chechen War turncoat, and Apti Alaudinov, who commands a unit fighting in Ukraine and seems to be the Kremlin’s preferred choice, eagerly watches on. Each possesses far more significant support among Chechnya’s elites than the risible Kadyrov siblings. Should one or the other make a play for the top spot, it is hard to see the Kadyrov dynasty surviving.

Still, none of the challengers represent a separatist movement. Each has a vested interest in maintaining Putin’s support — and thus the inflow of money and, should any troubles arise, extra security services. Each would be able to rule in much the same vein as Kadyrov. Meanwhile, a fragmented separatist movement lacks the resources and manpower to mount a serious challenge. Significant opposition to Chechnya’s status as part of the Russian Federation does exist, and some Chechens are even fighting against Russia in Ukraine, but Chechnya is not the rebellious place it once was. Unlike other peripheral regions, it has not seen major protests as a result of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Even anti-Russian rebel leaders have suggested that Kadyrov’s death would not be a “game changer”.

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The real danger for the Kremlin, then, is in Chechnya’s various power blocks engaging in an internal struggle so violent that it threatens regional stability. Unlike in the Nineties and 2000s, they would not fight for secession but for power. In a territory where mountainous and sparsely populated territory provides the perfect platform for guerilla warfare, and where performative masculine violence — showcased in regular mass demonstrations of Chechen military might — and traumatised veterans dominate political culture, such a conflict could easily spiral out of control. Perhaps the only way for Putin to restore order would be to deploy Russian troops en masse — and even then, judging by past wars, the conflict would not be resolved quickly.

That said, such a low-level conflict would not be regime ending. Putin’s propagandists would beat the patriotic drum, claiming that one or other (or all) sides were being funded by the usual enemies: the CIA, Islamic extremists, Ukraine. The conflict would be painted as just another example of how the West is trying to smash Russia apart — and thus proof that Putin remains the only man who knows how to face down this existential threat. It would fan the flames of anti-Muslim xenophobia, long nurtured by the Kremlin as a convenient means of rallying racial hatred for political ends and at a peak following the government’s handling of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attacks, rather than anti-Putin rebellion. Many Russians welcomed the sight of visibly brutalised Tajik Muslims appearing in court following the Crocus attacks; a wave of spontaneous victimisation of Central Asians has followed. In this febrile atmosphere, Chechens could easily receive the same sort of treatment.

In this case, Putin might emerge with his reputation intact or even enhanced. But a period of instability following Kadyrov’s death could also be a golden opportunity for Russia’s opponents to seriously weaken the Russian president. A military venture in Chechnya would hoover up significant money, manpower and materiel — all in short supply after two years of war in Ukraine. Just as the Russian army is gearing up for a big summer campaign to break through its stagnant position in eastern Ukraine, it could be drawn into a long and bloody war in Chechnya.

All Russia’s opponents need to do is fuel the ambitions of Kadyrov’s potential successors and encourage them to plot and commit violence against one another. Even providing arms to the handful of separatists operating in Chechnya or perhaps those fighting in Ukraine, if they were willing to return home to combat Putin, might be a viable option if it were to seriously disrupt Moscow’s war on Ukraine. Such a course of action would be cheap, has the potential to save Ukrainian lives, and might give Putin pause for thought as he weighs up his options vis-à-vis Kyiv. Kadyrov’s death might be the gifthorse a war-fatigued Western world is looking for.

I first met Kazbek last spring on a Ukrainian military base on the frontline in the Donbas. With his well-tended beard, he looked like a typical Chechen. I was surprised to see him. Chechens in Ukraine were, I thought, all fighting for Russia under orders from their leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin’s psychopathic puppet leader of Chechnya. I was wrong.

Russia’s victory in the Second Chechen War, which ended in April 2000, cemented Putin’s position as President. It also resulted in the levelling of Chechnya’s capital, Grozny. Many of those who had fought the Russians fled abroad, fanning out across Europe and the Middle East. But some were not done, and they eventually ended up in Ukraine, determined to keep battling Moscow wherever they could. Today, there are four dedicated Chechen battalions, at least two of which, the Dzhokhar Dudayev and Sheikh Mansur Battalions, have been fighting since the war began in 2014.

Kazbek is one of around 200 Chechens here. After leaving his home country in the 2000s, he married a Ukrainian woman and had a son, Deni. He considers himself a Chechen-Ukrainian. In the Donbas, the soldiers treat him like a cooler older brother. “He’s a great fighter,” my friend Dima told me. “Really good at tactics.”

That in itself isn’t surprising: Kazbek has been fighting Russians since the first Chechen War broke out in 1994. “Everyone rose up — women, children went to the mountains and the men went to war — every man,” he tells me now. He pauses. “We had no fear of the Russians,” he tells me. “Only rage.”

***

We drive out of Dnipro toward the base. Kazbek’s immaculate beard has grown, in eight months, into a bushy mass with an upturned moustache. His head remains a perfectly shaved, symmetrical dome. Now he is accompanied by his friend Yevgeny (half-Chechen, half-Ukrainian), who puts on some Chechen music. “Bro, first we go to the cemetery, is that ok?”

We pull off the motorway onto a side road and a sea of blue and yellow flags comes into view, surrounding the many rows of headstones. Lines of Ukrainian soldiers stand by the graves, many with their heads bowed in mourning. We drive through the cemetery until we arrive at a gate with a crescent moon on it: the Muslim section.

The favoured style of gravestone is black marble — with a portrait of the deceased. The graves are in rows, with the first line made up of mounds of earth: the latest arrivals have not yet had enough time to get headstones. We walk to one side where Kazbek and Yevgeny pause by a grave marked by a simple headstone with “Amina” written across it.

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Amina, Kazbek explains, was the wife of his comrade, Adam, and a famous fighter in Ukraine. She was shot by a gunman: a Kadyrovite not a Chechen, he is keen to stress. (In Ukraine, people only ever refer to Russia’s Chechen units like this, to demarcate them from those fighting for Kyiv.) Kadyrov and the Russian FSB are determined to hunt down all Chechens fighting for Ukraine and have deployed assassins across the country. The gunman was caught and sent to prison, but was then traded in a prisoner swap for Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker and activist from Crimea.

Kazbek and Yevgeny pose for a photo by the grave. Kazbek raises his finger skywards to show there is only one God, Allah. Religion is on his mind as we leave the graveyard. “Muslims, Jews, Christians, we all have one God. It’s the same school, just different classrooms.” This is Islam, Chechen-style. Religion is central to Kazbek’s life. “But I became a man in war. Before I never prayed to God,” he later told me. “My first weapon was a training rifle. We made Molotov cocktails — we had nothing else. When the sun rose on the second day of war, I had already seen many of my friends and neighbours die; I saw Russian planes in the sky. That was the day I learned how to pray.”

But his Islam is one that eschews fanaticism and a hatred of other religions. On his uniform he has, among other things, an Israeli flag. “The Israelis have helped Ukraine a lot in this war,” he explains.

Kazbek loves Ukraine but his time here has not always been straightforward. When he arrived, he had to convince many people that, as a Chechen, he was neither a terrorist nor a “barbarian”. Even today, like so many other Chechens fighting for Ukraine, he has not been granted citizenship. They have been promised it, but there are always more bureaucratic hurdles to overcome. It never ends.

“Getting a passport is a big problem because I have a shit Russian passport,” he tells me. “It’s wrong that a soldier cannot get a passport after all these years. I can get documents to fight in the war but not to live here as a citizen. It’s not about the Ukrainian people, who are great, but about bureaucracy.” In that sense, his situation reminds me of the many difficulties that those other fierce and effective soldiers, the Gurkhas, had in obtaining British citizenship.

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I ask Kazbek if there is anything the Chechens could teach the Ukrainians. “Most of all,” he says, “we show Ukraine that Russia can be defeated.” He never wants to be seen as boasting, so he adds quickly, “today, Ukraine is teaching the Chechens. Now I am studying how best to fight the Russians here. My unit are my brothers. Brothers in war, brothers in religion. Brothers in heart.”

This is unsurprising. He has been fighting in Ukraine for a long time; he was, he tells me, the first Chechen to do so. Soon after the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, he volunteered to join the army. He knew war was coming. He knew from Chechnya what the Russians would do. “I joined the 34th battalion,” he tells me. “And I went to fight in the East, I fought in Donetsk and Gorlovka. We got up close and saw fear in their eyes. And God helped us to win because truth is on our side.”

Kazbek adores Ukrainian rap and turns up the sound system. “Don’t fuck with Ukraine!” belts out in what has become an official anthem here. “I got ice in my veins/Loaded guns I’m insane/fight for peace in my land.” As we drive, Kazbek downs cans of Red Bull. “Russian Warship, go fuck yourself,” concludes the song. The music is fitting. Kazbek is a stormtrooper; his job is to attack Russian positions and kill as many of them as possible. “David, we take the fight to the Russians and only God knows who will win.”

We drive deep into the Donbas and once more Kazbek is in a thoughtful mood. “The problem is the Russians — they are imperialists in their hearts. Britain and France both had empires, but they passed into history. There is not one day Russia has not had an empire, or tried to have one.” He continues: “The industrial Revolution came, and the French and English realised that they needed to invest in the economy, in diplomacy. But the Russians are exactly like they were 300 years ago — just with gadgets.”

Kazbek’s words hint at something often overlooked in Western Europe and the United States. For Chechens and Ukrainians, as well as Georgians and Kyrgyz and Kazakhs and all the peoples of the Former Soviet Union (FSU), this war is about many things — but at heart it is an anti-colonialist struggle. That is why few here were surprised when, last year, Putin compared himself to Peter the Great; he openly admits to sharing the Tsar’s goal of returning “Russian lands” to a greater empire. When I speak to people from across the FSU, opinions on Ukraine are often mixed, but they all admire Ukrainians for standing up to Moscow. They know it could be them next.

As we close in on the base, Kazbek slows down and looks over at me. “Look, David, we want to live, not die. And we don’t have to die for Ukraine. All we have to do is kill for it.”

Have you had experience of being cast as pro-Putin for expressing unease about some of the Western measures against Russia?

Immensely, and painfully. But let’s be clear, my pain is neither here nor there when you have atrocities, murders, a whole country being devastated by Putin’s armies. Who gives a damn about how I feel about my treatment by people on social media?

Back in 2001, I labelled Vladimir Putin a war criminal because of the murder of 250,000 people in Grozny, Chechnya. It was in a Senate meeting of the University of Athens, which was discussing the motion for awarding an honorary doctorate to Putin, who had just become president of Russia. And I was in a minority of one opposing it. So having gone out on a limb, having condemned Putin, it was a bit surprising to be lambasted by several commentators as “Putin’s useful idiot.”

Was the charge against you based on your blaming Nato expansion for the current crisis?

The most pertinent criticism that I received was that I was “Westsplaining” — this is a version of “mansplaining” — that I was being condescending in the way that I was telling Eastern Europeans what’s in their interest. Now, that is a very serious accusation. Because we do know that mansplaining is something that we men often do.

While I’m not claiming to have the monopoly of truth, I do believe that as a European, as a citizen of the world, I have the right to, for instance, comment that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian power was built on a bedrock of animosity between the West and Russia, and that Putin exploited the humiliation of the Russians — at the hands of Nato, at the hands of the International Monetary Fund.

Don’t forget how in the Nineties, even the reformers — liberals, neoliberals in Russia — were crushed by the West, by the International Monetary Fund, forcing Russia into an awful default in 1998 that caused the life expectancy of men in Russia to drop from 75 to 58. It was a catastrophe, a humanitarian catastrophe. And Putin, being a KGB strategist, utilised that pent-up frustration of Russians against the West in order to build up his horrid empire.

Is your argument that without Nato expansion in Eastern Europe we would not be in this position?

My point is this: there was an agreement between Gorbachev and George Bush Senior that Gorbachev would let Eastern Europe go its own way, on the condition that Nato would not expand eastward. We know that; this is well established. Given that Putin was pushing Russia back towards a re-militarised stance, and Nato and Russia were always going to develop an enmity between them, is it not a good idea to have a neutral zone between the two? Do we really want Russian nuclear weapons and Nato nuclear weapons to be side by side? For me, the neutrality of Eastern Europe is not a second best, it would be first best. It will be good for the people of Eastern Europe, it will be good for Nato, and it will be good for Russia, to minimise tensions to the extent that we can do that.

But in any case, I am perfectly willing to accept an Eastern European progressive who says to me that I’m wrong. What I find intolerable is the lack of tolerance — that I’ve been told, “butt off, you’re a Westplainer in that you even have an opinion about what should be happening in Eastern Europe”. This is not a good foundation for Europeanism.

They do say that when war begins, the truth dies very quickly. But it’s not just truth. It’s a capacity that we have in the West to have a civilised, rational debate amongst ourselves.

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What about the sanctions against Russia — do you support them? 

Well, it’s always the case that when sanctions are slapped on a dictatorial regime they hurt the people, not the dictators. Especially in the case of Putin. Putin has a war chest, which is quite large. And he doesn’t care about the plight of Russian people. But let me be clear on this. I’m not against the sanctions. Watching the atrocities coming out now — the towns, the villages that the Russian army has vacated — watching the devastation on the coastal areas of eastern Ukraine, I can understand why people say, “look, we simply do not want to trade with these people — we’re not going to let them have access to their yachts, and to their money, and all that,” that’s fine by me.

I think that, in the end, we are going to have a lot more suffering — as a result of price increases, especially electricity prices — among the poor in Western Europe. I believe the dollar as the reserve currency is being placed under immense pressure. So I think that the American administration is going to live to regret the cutting off of the Central Bank of Russia from the dollar payment system.

But none of that matters really at this very moment. Because what matters is the war. Freddie, what keeps me up at night is that people are being killed. And what I want us to work for, all of us — and let’s iron out our differences: how can we have an immediate cessation of fire and a withdrawal of Russian troops?

What appalls me about those who purport to support Ukraine and who are attacking my position, is that they seem to be seriously considering the possibility that Ukraine is going to win the war and overthrow Putin. Now that’s completely pie in the sky. Anybody who believes that is jeopardising the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as we speak.

At best, you’re going to have a stalemate. Now a stalemate is terrible for the people of Ukraine. Because we know what Putin is going to do. He’s going to do what he did in Grozny. He’s going to raze to the ground areas that he needs to abandon. The Ukrainian army has been very heroic, and I applaud them for having resisted. But they cannot win the war. Do we really want this painful, murderous stalemate go on and on and on? Do we really want to invest in regime change in Russia that is instigated by the United States? Whenever the United States has tried to regime change we’ve had complete catastrophe. Look at Afghanistan, look at Iraq, look at Libya. And this is a nuclear power. Do we want to play with this fire, with this nuclear fire?

We should have an immediate ceasefire. President Zelenskyy, to his credit, has now adopted the proposal that I’ve been making from day one: that we should have an agreement between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin — of course, with Zelenskyy, and the European Union participating — that makes a very simple trade, a deal. Russia withdraws from Ukraine, in exchange for an end to the sanctions and a commitment, by the West, that Ukraine is going to be part of the West but not part of Nato.

Does that include being part of the EU?

Putin wants a way out. I think that the United States and Zelenskyy, together, and the EU, must give him a way out. If he can be seen to have won a victory — something that he can present to his own people as a victory (“I have ended Nato’s eastward expansion. I went to war to stop Nato expanding and I succeeded”), I think that we have a moral duty to give him this way out. Now, I can’t guarantee that he will take it. But the West can offer him this way out, to stop the killings.

A few weeks ago, giving an off-ramp to Putin might have proven popular. But it feels like the situation is different now. We’ve had a full-scale withdrawal of Russian troops from around Kyiv, and there seems to be increased confidence that something like a full-scale defeat might actually be in sight. What’s your reaction to that?

That’s madness. There is no way that the Ukrainian army is going to defeat the panoply of the Russian army in Mariupol, in the areas between Crimea, and Donbas. All power to them if they can do it. I don’t believe that Zelenskyy believes it. I don’t believe that anybody actually believes it. Yes, it is wonderful that Putin did not walk into Kyiv unopposed. It’s wonderful that he’s been given a bloody nose. This is the time to sue for peace.

Look, the West did that after the awful civil war in Yugoslavia. You’ll recall Srebrenica. We had atrocities galore across Bosnia. And not just in Bosnia — in Croatia, in Ukraine, in various areas that were devastated by the original civil war within Yugoslavia. And yet, under the auspices of the American President, the West sat down with Milosevic and they created an imperfect peace for Bosnia, which has been holding since then. Was that a mistake? Should we have continued the bloodletting, hoping that one side would completely annihilate the other side? I don’t believe so.

There’s talk of really escalating the amount of military hardware being sent to support the Ukraine war effort. I’m presuming from what you’re saying that you’d be against that?

While the Ukrainian army is resisting, I think we have a moral duty to support them militarily. Not me and you personally, but I’m not going to criticise the West for sending weapons to the Ukrainian resistors. But the whole point of resisting is to come to the point where we sue for peace. We can come to an agreement that leaves everybody slightly dissatisfied, which is the optimal agreement. Where, for instance, Ukraine stays out of Nato, it stops arming itself. Maybe there can be a demilitarised zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Crimea can be discussed in the next 10 years or so.

Such an agreement could also be augmented with an understanding that Ukraine would not be prevented from entering the EU. Well, that agreement goes hand-in-hand with ending the arms race on both sides. Because who knows, maybe Putin tomorrow is going to be supported by the Chinese military? Do we really want that kind of escalation?

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Something’s happened quite suddenly where to speak like that is now seen as a betrayal.

It’s what happens when war begins: we lose our head. Warmongering becomes cool and mainstream. Now, I have no doubt that there are cooler heads around Europe who are despairing. But they can’t speak out. I can see it in Germany, I can see it within the government of the Federal Republic: there are people who are besides themselves. They are pulling their hair out. Because if they speak out they will be immediately taken to task by the warmongers who are having a field day.

This is why it’s important that we band together to bring a modicum of rationality back to the debate and to focus on the only thing that matters at the moment. It’s not money. It’s not trade. It’s not natural gas. It is human lives in Ukraine. How can we stop people from dying? Because if they continue — the ones who put the theoretical right of Ukrainians to be members of Nato above the life of people in Ukraine, and above the opportunity of Ukraine to prosper as a Western democracy, which is inside the EU and outside of Nato — we’re going to be creating a quagmire that will ensure two things. Firstly, that thousands of people will die who could be saved, and secondly, that Ukraine is going to be a desert.

Do you observe that the people leading this warmongering, as you call it, would mainly describe themselves as liberals?

Yes. I can see that. But it’s not the first time. I remember when the United States were about to invade Iraq, even Left-wingers like Christopher Hitchens, a man that I admired all my life, became liberal imperialists. He was gung-ho about invading Iraq and spreading democracy. If you think of the early 1960s, it was JFK who initially showed a degree of enthusiasm for taking over Vietnam.

I do fear that it’s not just some liberal imperialists or liberal supporters of victory — of war until the final victory is achieved, as if it is possible to imagine invading Moscow. I feel that there’s something else there: a missing ingredient. Follow the money. The United States is a very complex economy. And it’s not homogeneous. Segments of the American economy are suffering as a result of the war, with the increasing price of oil. I believe Silicon Valley is not happy, because they’re being put in a very difficult situation. Even the banking sector, Wall Street, can’t really be enjoying what’s going on.

But if you are selling weapons, you are having a party. You have Olaf Scholtz, the German Chancellor, about to order 100 billion euros worth of American equipment, because the Germans are not making the stuff. If you are providing fracked oil and gas from New Mexico, from Minnesota, from Texas, you are looking at the new deals that are being struck between the European Union and the United States for LNG (liquefied natural gas), and you are rubbing your hands with glee. Because what was a dying industry in the United States now suddenly has been given a huge lease of life. This is not a conspiracy. If you have liberal imperialists, and you’ve got people that are going to make a lot of money out of this liberal imperialism, and you bring these together, you have a very powerful constituency in favour of maintaining the conflicts.

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A lot of people will listen to what you’ve just said and think that it is verging on conspiracy: evil Americans in suits sitting around board tables, trying to create wars in order to profit from them. 

There’s no conspiracy; nothing of what I said is conspiracy. It’s the truth that if you’re selling arms, you are making a lot of money. If you’re selling oil and gas that is fracked in the United States, you are making a lot of money. We know that.

It’s not causation though, is it? It’s one thing to observe that, but those people aren’t in charge of making the decisions.

Of course. Because why didn’t they do it ten years ago? They would have had an interest in doing this ten years ago. Nobody forced Putin to invade. It wasn’t Nato’s fault that he invaded, even if Nato created circumstances for him to be powerful, in my view. It was Putin’s criminal choice to invade Ukraine. And that gave rise to military resistance by the Ukrainians, which I applaud. And then on the coat-tails of these developments that have nothing to do with them, people come in with particular axes to grind, political ones, and financial agendas. So the whole thing acquires momentum. This is not a conspiracy theory. That is, I think, a solid rational analysis of what was going on.

How, then, should we treat the very popular and successful president of Ukraine? He has been incredibly effective at generating international attention. Should we support him? Should we be critical of him?

We should be critically supportive. Look, I followed Zelenskyy’s career. It was interesting that he was elected on a platform for making peace with Moscow, and for sidelining the oligarchic and ultra Right-wing elements within Ukraine. We have to note that. It’s also true that he failed in doing this to a very large extent: the oligarchs that he was going to wage war against effectively had him. His reign has not been easy. And the oligarchs managed to maintain their control over the country, some would say, forcing Zelenskyy to succumb.

The neo-Nazi Azov battalion in Mariupol and so on maintain their swastikas. I’m sure that Zelenskyy wanted to get rid of them, but he couldn’t. But none of this matters. Because when a country is invaded, I feel a natural duty to support the people who have been invaded and to support their leader — even if it’s somebody I would not have voted for, had I been one of them.

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But what about this overt campaign by Zelenskyy to encourage more direct Western military intervention?

He’s the leader of a country that is being invaded: it is perfectly natural for him to be calling upon the rest of the world to come to their assistance. I’m sure he would have loved it if Nato waltzed in, even though I’m sure he understands that it would bring us to the precipice of a nuclear catastrophe. It is his job to ask for us to step in.

But to his credit, he’s done something else as well. He’s embraced the neutrality solution. And he is participating in discussions with Russians, and negotiations. Let’s face it, the European Union is a figment of our imagination. We’re so fragmented, we are a non-player, really. It’s only the United States that can provide Zelenskyy with the backing he needs in his negotiations with Putin.

What people object to about that is that it has the whiff of people making decisions for smaller countries over their heads. What the people of Ukraine want is neither here nor there.

My own country would not exist if we didn’t have such an arrangement back in the late 1820s. We were under the Ottomans for 400 or 500 years. We had our own revolution, our own resistance against the Ottoman armies. In the end, how did Greece come about? It came about because the great powers — the English, the French, and the Russians — sat down with the Ottomans. And they said: “Greece becomes an independent state, it’s a kind of buffer zone between the Ottoman Empire and the West”. And we were given a chance to exist.

What is your message, then, to people who object to the invasion of Ukraine but also feel deeply uneasy about the West’s involvement? How should they react when they are called Putin supporters?

Be kind. I don’t think you should antagonise anybody these days, because there is so much antagonism already. Maintain your cool, support the Ukrainian resistance against Putin’s armies. Do not succumb to the silence of militarism and perpetual war. And always keep your eye on the trophy, which is immediate peace, withdrawal of Russian troops — and a neutral, democratic Ukraine that we all help get back up on its feet.

But despite this bleak picture, one man has stood firm in his support for the invasion, both financially and with man-power: Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kadyrov is the governor of Chechnya, the small region in the North Caucasus that has repeatedly fought for its independence against Russian rule. Putin reintegrated the region in the early 2000s with the help of Kadyrov’s father, Akhmad. Following the assassination of Akhmad in 2004 by Chechen Islamists, Kadyrov developed a close relationship with Putin, frequently likened to that of father and son. He eventually took over as the head of Chechnya in 2007, receiving the Russian president’s full backing.

The personalist nature of this relationship is crucial: Kadyrov’s loyalty does not extend to the government or Russia, it is only to Putin himself. This has meant that Kadyrov has grown bolder throughout his rule, clashing with security services and even flouting federal policies. Suffice it to say, support for Kadyrov in the Kremlin does not reach much further than the president’s office. This history is important for evaluating the size of the gamble Kadyrov is taking in his support for the invasion, and what he has already gained.

In Chechnya itself, Kadyrov’s rule is characterised by brutal, indiscriminate violence. His campaign to purge the republic of its LGBTQ community, part of a policy of extrajudicial executions, is well-documented. At the start of this year, he embarked on his anti-dissident war with renewed vigour, conducting mass kidnappings of critics’ relatives. This included violently abducting Zarema Musaeva, the mother of a Chechen human rights lawyer, from Nizhny Novgorod in January; she is still held by police.

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This violence has been carried out by the Chechen security services, known as the kadyrovtsy, which operate as Kadyrov’s personal army. These units rarely leave Chechnya, and even then, only for training exercises. Kadyrov mobilised his top commanders and units at the beginning of February, sending them to the staging areas near the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. Moving as one large group, the units known to be involved in the invasion are the “Sever” and “Yug” Battalions (“North” and “South,” respectively), the “Akhmat-Grozny” riot (OMON) police unit, and the “Akhmat” rapid-response (SOBR) police unit.

Allegedly deployed on March 22nd is the Akhmat Kadyrov Police Regiment, the most notorious in Chechnya, and possibly in Russia. This is the unit largely responsible for the extrajudicial executions and the anti-LGBTQ purges. While Kadyrov claims they are now in Ukraine, he has faked their deployment before, and they just returned from a SWAT competition in the UAE.

The most important leader within these units is Magomed Tushaev, commander of “Sever” Battalion. While his counterpart in the “Yug” Battalion, Khusein Mezhidov, has appeared more prominently in propaganda clips, Tushaev played a more significant role in the psychological warfare during the military buildup and the initial days of the invasion, stemming from the brutal reputation developed by Tushaev’s unit during counterterrorism operations in Chechnya.

Tushaev was rumoured to have been killed on February 26th, the kadyrovtsy’s worst day of casualties. It soon transpired that he was, in fact, alive, yet many of Kadyrov’s opponents abroad keep repeating it, allowing Tushaev’s presence to continuously make them look foolish.

In addition to these units’ leaders, Kadyrov sent in his cousins: brothers Sharip Delimkhanov, commander of Rosgvardia in Chechnya, and Alibek Delimkhanov, deputy commander of Rosgvardia’s North Caucasus forces. Their final brother, Adam, is a Duma parliamentarian from Chechnya who is now overseeing the kadyrovtsy’s operations in Mariupol. These units were engaged near Kyiv but could not take sufficient ground to carry out their objective: assassinating President Zelenskyy. Accordingly, Kadyrov pulled them back to Chechnya, deploying new, unidentified units near Mariupol under the leadership of Adam Delimkhanov. These reinforcements also failed the crucial task of taking the Azovstal metallurgy plant, which instead had to be bombed.

Kadyrov’s financial backing for the invasion has come from the Akhmat Kadyrov Fund (AKF), his family’s private slush fund. It was primarily created by embezzling federal subsidies to the republic and racketeering businesses and state employees. As part of the war effort, the AKF has supplied food and equipment to his troops on the frontlines, as well as military vehicles to the authorities of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. He has also used his corrupt slush-fund to provide humanitarian aid to the residents of Melitopol, which is under Russian occupation.

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The invasion may still be in its infancy, but a number of consequences of Kadyrov’s gamble are already visible. Most obviously, his information war has proved a success. He continuously makes his critics look foolish about the fact that Tushaev is alive, and he has been able to stage rallies in support of the invasion far beyond Chechnya. Kadyrov’s simultaneous campaign to court the Arabic-speaking world has also helped keep Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from siding against Russia in the pitched economic battle. For Putin, at least, this is enough to justify his decision to make Kadyrov Russia’s chief diplomatic emissary to the Muslim world — even if it does backfire when he prioritises Muslim issues over Kremlin policy, such as with his support for the Ronhingya.

In elite politics, Kadyrov is also coming out ahead. His strong support for Putin, when others were more hesitant, is a clear win. The domestic turmoil in both the FSB and Rosgvardia — exacerbated by American and Ukrainian intelligence disclosures pointing to leaks from the security services — plays to his advantage. Kadyrov’s long-running feud with federal security service leadership means that, the more endangered their futures become, the more secured his is.

Yet not everything is going to plan. For all his propaganda victories, Kadyrov’s biggest loss is that the kadyrovtsy’s reputational bubble has burst. Almost everyone, except the Chechen propaganda circus, has noted that his army has not engaged in fighting, but has still sustained significant casualties. This is likely to embolden his opponents among the Russian political elite, who may fear him a little less, making increased confrontation possible.

In Chechnya, too, his position will be weakened. There currently are and will be fewer kadyrovtsy, as many are engaged, while others have been killed, in Ukraine. It is also important to remember that not all of the kadyrovtsy are devout members of the Kadyrov cult of personality. Forced recruitment into their ranks has long been used as a tactic for containing societal discontent, but failure will only exacerbate it.

For the time being, however, Kadyrov is performing adequately. He is not doing as well as he would hope, but he is certainly not faring poorly, and is generally proving his value to Putin. The elite conflict among security elites could flip on him, but his propaganda victories should keep that at bay.

None of this is to say his safety is guaranteed. In the coming weeks, several trends should be closely watched to see how Kadyrov’s luck holds — the clearest of which is the continued invasion. For now, continued war means continued opportunities for propaganda, one of his favorite activities. This is representative of his regime, prioritising flash over substance. But while Tushaev may not have been killed, the abundance of Kadyrov’s trusted advisors in the field increases the odds of this happening to his allies. Were a number of them to perish, he could quickly find himself isolated.

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Then there are the worsening socioeconomic conditions in Chechnya. According to the region’s authorities, there is “no deficit of sugar”, one of the key economic benchmarks; according to reports, the AKF is now handing out sugar to some families. No doubt Kadyrov will keeping a close eye on this: socioeconomic concerns have proved to be the only mobilising grievance for the Chechen public in the current repressive atmosphere. This previous expression of dissent was led by women, who may also now have sons fighting and dying in Ukraine. Women have already led protests elsewhere in the North Caucasus, making this a distinct possibility in Chechnya.

Added to this is the fact that the entire North Caucasus region now faces mass economic disruptions from the new sanctions regime. While experts have noted the region’s potential resilience to the sanctions’ effects, their repercussions on the federal budget are not yet clear. The fate of the federal subsidies, upon which the North Caucasus relies, is still undecided.

The final threat to Kadyrov is the reshuffling of the elite hierarchy. While Kadyrov is currently edging out federal security officials, his advantage may not hold in the long run. Anticipating this, he is trying to earn federal recognition as the North Caucasus’s most important leader. Yet the Kremlin has worked to establish Sergei Melikov, head of neighbouring Dagestan, as a regional counterweight to Kadyrov — as most non-Putin officials in the Kremlin are wary of his influence in this corner of Russia. Whether he poses a significant threat to Kadyrov is still unclear: at a recent national security meeting, Kadyrov took the opportunity to, quite literally, shunt Melikov to the side. Elite jockeying is, after all, an art of longevity.

It was proof that, for now at least, Kadyrov remains in a strong position. But the consequences of Russia’s latest incursion into Ukraine are still coming into focus. The fate of the war has yet to be decided and the full effects of sanctions have not been felt. When the dust finally settles, Kadyrov may not be standing where he thought he was.

This isn’t the first time the Wagner Group has taken part in a war; it’s just the first time it’s caught the attention of UK newspapers. In France, though, it has been on the radar for years. And with good reason. The Putin regime has long had bases in the south of France (Putin himself was actually holidaying in Biarritz when Yeltsin called him with the order to take over the Kremlin). But more pressingly, in the last decade Wagner have increasingly interfered in French zones of influence in the Middle East and Africa: Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and, in January this year, Mali, the focus of France’s Operation Barkhane against Sahel jihadists.

As Alexandra Jousset and Ksenia Bolchakova’s TV documentary made plain, the key problem in understanding the Wagner Group is this: it does not officially exist. No company of that name is registered in Russia. Instead, Wagner is a grey network of Russian businesses and mercenary activity. But what is clear in the murk are two key figures.

Wagner’s founder and leader is former Russian special forces officer Dmitry Utkin, a veteran of the Chechen wars. Reputedly, Lieutenant-colonel Utkin’s military call sign was “Wagner”, after Hitler’s favourite composer (Utkin is obsessed with Nazi Germany, suggesting Putin’s “de-nazification” programme could start closer to home than the Ukraine). But the power behind the Wagnerian throne is oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is serially sanctioned by the United States, including for his financing of the troll-factory Internet Research Agency, which interfered in American elections in 2016 and 2018.

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In 2020, investigative news site Bellingcat published telephone records revealing that Prigozhin had made 99 calls to Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff in eight months. So cosy is Prigozhin with the Russian president that he is dubbed “Putin’s chef”, metaphorically serving up what the Kremlin requires in foreign policy. The Kremlin itself maintains that Prigozhin is quite literally Putin’s caterer — he is, after all, a skilled restauranteer. Beginning as a hot-dog seller in Leningrad, Prigozhin went onto oversee a chain of classy restaurants good enough even for the epicurean French president Jacques Chirac, and has coordinated many banquets for Putin.

Still, the Kremlin continuously and strenuously denies it has any influence over Wagner. French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian recently blasted the group for ”supporting” Mali’s ruling junta, and accused Russia of lying about Wagner’s existence. “When we asked our Russian colleagues about Wagner, they said they don’t know anything,” Le Drian told France 24. He added: “When it comes to mercenaries who are Russian veterans, who have Russian weapons, who are transported by Russian planes, it would be surprising if the Russian authorities did not know about it.”

In truth, Wagner and Russian security departments overlap. Putin has been photographed at a Kremlin banquet with Wagner troops (including Dmitry Utkin), whose training facility at Molkino in southern Russia is next door to that of Russian special forces, the spetsnaz.

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The Wagner Group was birthed in Ukraine in 2014, when Russian military intelligence backed unmarked troops led by Utkin in the annexation of Crimea. Since then, the group’s web of influence has spread to the Middle East, Latin America, and principally Africa. Shocking revelations about the conduct of Wagner fighters followed. In 2017, four Wagner operatives — the group’s distinctive skull logo clearly visible on their uniforms — mutilated and eventually beheaded a Syrian army deserter, Mohammed Taha Ismail al-Abdullah, with a spade. (Tracking down, interrogating and murdering rebels and deserters is very much the Wagner Group’s modus operandi; in Ukraine it is most likely to be at work in areas already seized by the Russian Army.) A fifth Wagnerian acted as the cameraman for the movie. A lawsuit brought by al-Abdullah’s brother got unsurprisingly short shrift from the Moscow City Court.

Meanwhile, in the Central African Republic, both the UN and France claim that Wagner have been responsible for raping and robbing unarmed civilians in the country’s rural areas. An exclusive document obtained by France 5 details the execution of a man on the side of a road in the north of the country by a Wagner unit. In Libya, the BBC obtained a Samsung tablet owned by a Wagner fighter, which revealed he had been placing unmarked personnel mines in a civilian area — an unalloyed war crime, enough to get any real army in the dock at Den Haag.

Which explains, perhaps, why Putin uses the Wagner Group. In the words of Kevin Limonier, Professeur en Géopolitique et Études Slaves at the University of Paris, subcontracting operations to Wagner allows the Kremlin the “denial of causality”. Cost is also a factor: Wagner creatively self-finances (Bashar al-Assad’s regime allowed the Group 25% of the profits from oil and gas fields seized), thus lifting pressure on Moscow’s coffers.

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But the group’s usefulness goes beyond that. Using Wagner as a proxy avoids home scrutiny of combat losses. As many as 600 hundred Wagnerians died fighting in Syria alone. In early 2018 Wagner fighters — who, paid about £2,000 a month, are mostly former Russian regulars — attacked an outpost manned by US special forces and their allies at a Conoco gas plant in Syria’s Deir Ezzor Province: embarrassingly, the Wagner company suffered 200 casualties. Yevgeny “The Chef” Prigozhin is unlikely to inform potential clients that his crack force is not all it’s cracked up to be.

It is flexible, though. An examination of the Central African Republic’s recent history shows how Moscow has shifted Wagner from combat roles to propping up fragile regimes by providing troop-training, defence of installations, and the protection of top officials. France 5 also discovered that Wagner is behind troll factories in Mali and neighbouring countries pumping out anti-French propaganda.

Indeed, no regime seems more prone to Wagner’s influence than Mali, where the group’s appearance at Camp 101, north of Bamako airport, in January was one of the reasons given by French president Emmanuel Macron for his recent decision to pull out 2,400 troops from the country. Macron told French media that the Mali military junta considered Wagner “the best partners they can find to protect their power, not to fight against terrorism”. France was not interested in junta-propping. Macron also claimed the Wagner group was “arriving with predatory intentions, but why?”

To build Russian influence, Monsieur Macron. Wagner is the Kremlin’s new favoured tool for establishing a political presence in receptive regimes. Macron’s retreat from the Sahel, where the French army has fought an insufficiently applauded and under-supported war against Islamic extremism, leaves a vacuum, and politics hates a vacuum. Enter: Putin, Prigozhin, and 1,000 Wagner troops.

Ukraine. Mali. Syria. As far as the Wagner Group is concerned it is all one simultaneous war. As Vassily, an active Wagner mercenary, told France 5, “At present, the Russian Federation is not yet an empire, but it intends to become one again… Wagner is one of the instruments to achieve this goal.” The danger is that while all eyes are on Ukraine, Putin is wielding the Wagner Group to achieve victories for Russian power politics in parts of the world British newspapers pay less attention to. And that would be a real Götterdämmerung for the West.

Then, abruptly, last weekend Dijon had the great misfortune to become newsworthy. War broke out, we were told, between “Chechen gangs” and “Arab gangs”. The dispute was, some French media reported, about the right to traffic drugs. The Daily Mail announced that the French army had been sent in to restore order. Marine Le Pen compared Dijon to Beirut. Similar “wars between migrant communities” now threatened, she said, all over France.

All these reports were, I believe, wrong or deeply misleading. What did happen in Dijon over four days the other weekend was surreal and disturbing. But the incidents defy simple explanation or political point-scoring. They say, perhaps, more about Chechnya, and the values — good and bad — of exiled Chechens, than they do about the wider racial issues of France. The severity of the violence probably owed something to the frustrations of France’s recent nine weeks of Covid lockdown. The political and media reaction was skewed by the fact that the events occurred while France was in the midst of a debate about race and policing – in the wake of the George Floyd killing in the United States.

On Sunday evening, on the third night of violence in Dijon, President Emmanuel Macron happened to be addressing the nation on TV. He said, among many other things, that he would resist all pressure to splinter France into ethnic communities.

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So what had happened over four days in Dijon? There are several conflicting accounts. Here, briefly, are the facts that I have been able to establish.

On 9th June a 15-year-old (some say 16-year-old) boy of Chechen origin was badly beaten up outside a chicha (hookah) bar in central Dijon. His attackers were local men in their 30s of African and North African origin. According to the Chechen version of events, the men were drug-dealers. The injured boy apparently had no connection with drugs. The dealers attacked him because local Chechens were known to be hostile to drug-trafficking. They put a gun in the boy’s mouth and said: “We hate Chechens. We’re going to let you live so you can tell the other Chechens what’s going to happen to them.”

Three days later a convoy of cars arrived in Dijon packed with Chechen men from several other parts of France, as well as Belgium and Germany. Local media and police say that there were 100 of them; the Chechens say that there were only 15. They smashed up the chicha bar, assaulted its owner and then rampaged through the multi-racial Les Grésilles area of council estates just north-east of central Dijon.

The next day — last Saturday, 13 June —  members of local drug gangs threatened and attacked local Chechens. A new convoy of cars and 50 to 100 Chechen men returned that evening, apparently hoping to agree, or force, a deal with the people in Les Grésilles and learn the names of the drug dealers.

A quarrel broke out. Shots were fired — by members of a local drug dealing gang, according to the Chechens. A pizzeria owner was wounded but not seriously. The next day about 100 Chechen men gathered once again in Les Grésilles. Local media, backed by video footage, reported that the invaders smashed windows and assaulted passers-by. A local man tried to ram them in a car. He crashed and overturned the car and was beaten up by the Chechens.

Local people complained that the police stood back and made no attempt to intervene. No arrests were made.

Finally, last Monday night, the Chechens stayed away. But 200 or so young men from Les Grésilles — of various ethnic origins, African and North African and European, judging by the footage — rampaged through their own streets and invaded other council estates nearby. They waved guns and knives, overturned and burned cars, and smashed windows and bus-shelters. Four arrests were made.

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This orgy of revenge violence is explained by local people and police in various ways. Anger with police for failing to prevent the Chechen attacks; a statement of strength by the local drugs gangs; frustration because the Chechens had failed to turn up for a fourth night of mayhem.

Police and gendarmerie reinforcements were deployed, belatedly, on Sunday and Monday; the French army was not. Gendarmes are part of the French military, but they are policemen not soldiers. The Daily Mail may or may not be aware of that fact.

Whatever Ms Le Pen may say, these events were not a war between different ethnic communities — still less a ‘war between Chechens and Arabs’ as the British tabloids reported. There is practically no Chechen community in Dijon — 100 people at most. In the whole of France, there are perhaps 30,000 Chechens, concentrated in Paris, Alsace and the Nice areas. All are refugees from their homeland’s conflict with Moscow. Most are legally resident in France. Some are not.

Nor does this story have anything to do with turf battles over drug trafficking rights. All Chechens that I spoke to insist that they have a common hatred of drugs and therefore often come into conflict with drugs gangs in France.

They insist that the battle of Dijon was about Chechen concepts of honour, pride and self-defence — a reflex forged in the civil wars fought by the majority muslim country against Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation from the 1990s. Whenever Chechens are attacked, a section of the Chechen diaspora in western Europe feels the need to take the law into its own hands. There have been similar, but smaller, events in recent months in Troyes, Rouen and Nice.

“Chechens defied Russia. They’re not going to let themselves be humiliated by a few thugs,” said Chamil Albakov, spokesman for the European Chechen Assembly. He rejected suggestions that there was systematic racial tension in France between Chechens and other migrant or refugee communities and especially fellow muslims of North African origin. The Chechen quarrel was with drug-traffickers and other criminals, he said. “Otherwise, we live together and in the mosques we pray together.”

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A police intelligence report leaked to Le Parisien paints a more complex and darker picture. A section of the Chechen community in France — by no means all — is involved in organised crime, though not drug dealing. Others have taken over many of the jobs in the overnight security and club bouncer business, some legitimate and some more dubious and violent.The Chechen convoy which descended on Dijon was, French police believe, composed of a mixture of night security guards, club bouncers and criminals.

Heda Inderbaeva, 29, who came to France as a refugee from Chechenya at the age of 11, is an unofficial spokeswoman for the 30,000 or so Chechens in France. “Direct action like this is wrong,” she told UnHerd. “We live now in a country of laws. There are other ways to react. But this was born of frustration that many Chechens feel about the low level of police action against drug-trafficking in the poorer districts of French cities and suburbs — a sense that the police are not protecting us so we have to do it ourselves. The frustration perhaps built up during the Covid lockdown when many people felt abandoned by the police.”

Some politicians, including Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, suggest that the real motive behind the violence was a conflict over drug territory. Ms Inderbaeva rejects that argument out of hand. “Yes there are some Chechen criminals but they traffic in cars or maybe arms,” she said. “Never drugs, never women, never children. Chechens have a horror of that kind of thing.”

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The picture of France that emerges from the Dijon story is not flattering or positive. But it is not — whatever Ms Le Pen may glibly say — a picture of a country that is about to erupt into generalised, Lebanese-type intra-community warfare. Still less is it the Chechen vs. Arab war that British tabloids suggested.

Anyone who has spent some time in the troubled estates of the French banlieues (inner suburbs) knows that they are social ghettoes but not, in any strict sense, racial ghettoes. Any cité (tower block estate) might house a score of ethnicities from Algerian to Albanian. Fighting between gangs of kids, or the composition of football teams, is based on territory, not racial background. The footage from Dijon showed black, brown and some white youths rampaging together in anti-Chechen fury.

The Chechens, with a different history and different reason for being in France, are an exception. They are bound by their own codes of honour and self-defence. For a variety of reasons, partly their own cultural attitudes, maybe sometimes their racist attitudes, they have had more difficulty in integrating. Some have plunged enthusiastically into crime. Other law-abiding Chechens, and sometimes the criminals themselves, find it hard to accept the unacceptable state of endemic insecurity and crime in French inner suburbs.

That may be the real story of the battle of Dijon. A series of vigilante raids, disturbing in themselves, was transmuted by some media and political commentary into a war over drug empires or a harbinger of ethnic conflict. The everyday, drug-related violence in the inner suburbs of many French towns and cities — even peaceful Dijon — goes virtually unreported.

“Just one,” says a woman in a loosely tied headscarf. “They only let one family in”.

Like others, she immediately starts to queue to buy another ticket. Like others, she will take the same train back to the Polish border at 8.18am tomorrow, hoping this time she and her family will be the lucky ones.

The scene in Brest, a city of around 300,000 people situated on the Eastern border of the European Union, has been repeating for almost two years. The only thing that changes is the number of people who board the train. Less than a year ago there were 400-500 of them every morning – at its peak, as many as 3,000 refugees were waiting in Brest to cross the Polish border by train, the vast majority of them Chechens, with some Tajiks, Uzbeks and Armenians as well.

Among them, according to organisations such as Amnesty International and the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, are victims of torture, persecution and other forms of violence. A humanitarian crisis is looming over this quiet border city that itself has a complex history of changing national affiliations.

Today the numbers of people trying to cross are much lower. Around 200-300 asylum seekers now wait in Brest, explains Maksim Kavaleu, a lawyer from the Belarusian human rights organisation Human Constanta, and each day 60-80 take the train to the Polish border town of Terespol. But the numbers constantly change. Kavaleu tells me that the record for the most attempts made by a refugee to cross the border is 65.

Among those trying to cross is Madina, tall and erect in her long dark dress, and with a steely look of determination.[1. The names of the protagonists have been changed.] With her two sons, aged 11 and 12, she travelled to Brest by taxi from her small village in Chechnya (there is no border control between the Russian Federation and Belarus).

Madina has been in Brest for only a week but she has already tried to cross the border five times. Every time she tried to explain to the border guards that she wanted to request asylum she heard the same question: “Are you going to Europe to work?”

You only have two minutes to explain your situation, she complains over a cup of tea in the hostel room next to the train station that she is renting for US$7 a night. There is no privacy; everybody around can hear what you are saying. But the worst thing, she says, is that they do not want to listen. “They interrupted me many times and they kept asking: ‘Do you have family in Europe?’”

If “they” – the Polish border guards – were willing to listen, she would tell them her story. It is a story about her husband who was killed a few years ago, his body dumped at a petrol station. He had problems with the military, she tells, her eyes empty. Madina escaped to France, but returned to Chechnya after a few months, where the police, Madina says vaguely, kept harassing her and her family.  She did not feel safe. Besides, her late husband’s family, in accordance with Chechen custom, wanted to take custody of her sons. “I want to give my children a future; I want them grow up in a safe place,” she says.

Madina has some savings, but the money is quickly running out and she is worried. Each journey to and from Terespol costs $10 per person. Staying in Belarus is not an option. Human Rights Watch described the country’s asylum system as “dysfunctional”. The Chechens do not feel safe here, and there have been reports of undercover Chechen security force agents intimidating asylum-seekers in Brest. KGB, the Belarusian secret service, closely cooperates with Kadyrovtsy, the security service of the Putin-backed Chechen president, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Madina casts a glance at her sons, who are watching a cartoon on a mobile phone. “Do you know a lawyer, anyone who could help us?” she asks, looking at me expectantly.

___

The migration flow into the Eastern border the European Union is not a new phenomenon. Since the 1990s, around 80,000 asylum seekers from the former USSR have crossed the border. The majority are Chechens, who fled their country after the first and then second Chechen wars with Russia.

Larisa Suleymanova, a philologist and translator, came to Poland via this route from the Chechen capital Grozny in 2004. “There was nothing … no integration courses, no psychological counselling, almost no NGOs dealing with migrants,” she recalls when we meet in Warsaw, where she has been living for the last few years working as a mentor and translator for other Russian-speaking refugees. “The whole assistance system was under construction. But people received us warmly’ there were no problems.”

Even in a homogenous country such as Poland, where in 2013 immigrants amounted to less than 1% of the population (a statistic that has started to change with the influx of Ukrainian migrants over the last few years), the 8,000 Chechen refugees who came to Poland were not a big group. Nor were they very visible –many of the refugee centres were located in non-urban areas, far from big cities.

Besides, Poland was a transit country for most: at least 75% of asylum-seekers who entered Poland continued their journey further west, to Germany, Austria or France.

That may help to explain why Poland had some of the highest levels of openness towards refugees in Europe – pollsters CBOS in May 2015 found that 72% of people thought that Poland should take in refugees. That would soon change.

___

In September 2017 a young Chechen woman was beaten in Warsaw after dropping her children off at kindergarten. The attacker was a Polish father whose children went to the same preschool. This was not an isolated case. Between 2014 and 2016 the total number of proceedings concerning hate crimes in Poland tripled.

Joanna Subko, from the office of the Polish Ombudsman, said the nature of hate crimes has also worsened. “While before the dominating form of hate crime was hate speech, now the proportions have changed and there are more cases of physical violence,” she said. “Their most common targets are Muslims now, though their minuscule number in Poland has not changed.” According to the State’s Prosecutor’s Office, in 2015 there were 64 reported cases of hate crimes against Muslims; in 2017 the number was 328.

Politics has contributed to this change of attitude. In autumn 2015, while thousands of asylum-seekers were crossing the ‘Balkan route’ and Europe started to talk about a “migration crisis”, Poland was in the middle of an election campaign. And while the Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans coming to Europe rarely reached Poland, they soon became one of the election’s main topics.

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The refugees bring “all sorts of parasites and protozoa”, declared Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which went on to win with an absolute majority. Kaczyński and other right-wing politicians also linked refugees to terrorist attacks in Europe, repeating that they would not expose Poland to such danger by accepting refugees from Muslim countries.

Despite the fact that the only well-known Muslims in Poland are a small community of Tatars who have lived there since the 14^th century, and that the vast majority of the population has never had any contact with Muslims, these campaign statements had a deep impact.

Poles started to be afraid. A new CBOS poll in May 2016 found that 63% of respondents were against accepting refugees from the Middle East and Africa. According to various opinion polls, Poles are now more afraid of terrorist attacks and refugees than losing their job or being victim of a crime.

The new, more hostile, political climate inevitably affected the situation at the border. In August 2016, when a few hundred desperate asylum-seekers organised a strike in Brest, appealing to the Polish state to recognise them as refugees, the then-Polish Minister of Interior, Mariusz Błaszczak, replied: “We will not succumb to the pressure of those who want to create an immigration crisis.” He added: “There is no war in Chechnya – it is an attempt to create a new route for Muslims who come to Europe.”

A significant number of people trying to cross the border in Terespol could probably be defined as ‘economic migrants’. But a sizeable minority are not. The Warsaw-based International Humanitarian Initiative Foundation, which provides psychological assistance to asylum-seekers and torture survivors, identified 320 people affected by torture in Chechnya and 122 direct victims of it among the migrants in Brest in the second half of 2016.

According to Maria Książak, a psychologist with the foundation, they found evidence that migrants had been struck with electricity, burnt with cigarettes, and beaten with sticks, cables and plastic bottles filled with water. They were illegally arrested, deprived of sleep, food, light and medical help. Many, she says, were threatened with death and forced to watch others being tortured.

Only a very small number of them were granted entry to Poland. Two particular cases ended up in the European Court for Human Rights. In the case of “Hamid K”, a Chechen asylum-seeker who tried to enter Poland 31 times, the court ordered interim measures that explicitly prohibited Polish authorities from returning him to Belarus. The Polish government ignored the order.

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For the Polish Ministry of Interior, it is simple: the war in Chechnya finished in 2009, so Chechens – who are officially Russian citizens – who come to Europe are economic migrants. But for many, Chechyna isn’t safe.

Iwona Kaliszewska, an anthropologist from Warsaw University who regularly visits Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan, says Chechnya is essentially a police state. Ruled by Kremlin-backed Kadyrov, it is a place of human rights violations, political persecution, torture and forced disappearances.

“Apart from the classic categories of political opponents and independent journalists, who face problems in the whole Russian Federation, one of the groups exposed to persecutions are homosexual men,” explains Kaliszewska. Last year, the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta revealed the existence of camps in which up to 100 gay men were detained, beaten and electrocuted, with at least three allegedly murdered.

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Many women are also fleeing to Europe to escape from domestic violence that usually goes unpunished in the region. There are people fleeing honour crimes –not uncommon in the Caucasus region. And unsettled personal feuds – many dating back to the war – are often solved using the state apparatus of violence.

Finally, explains Kaliszewska, there are the Salafis, the followers of a purist movement within Sunni Islam who are considered terrorists by Kadyrov, who supports and promotes only ‘traditional Chechen Islam’ – Islam inspired by practices of the mystical Sufi order, Qadiriya. Salafis[1. Salafism, like Wahhabism, is a fundamentalist form of Islam that in some parts of the world is antagonistic to those considered to be enemies of Islam. In 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism.] are often the ones whose arrests, or even extrajudicial killings, boost the statistics of the ‘war on terror’ – for which the Chechnyan government receives funding from Kremlin.

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The fate of some of those who are returned to the Russian Federation should also sound alarm bells. In February 2015, three months after being deported from Sweden to Chechnya, 23-year-old Kana Afanasyev was killed in Grozny. His corpse bore the marks of electric shocks. In July 2015, 30-year-old Zaurbek Zhamaldaev, recently deported from Poland, was believed to have been kidnapped in Moscow, and has not been heard from since. The total number of such cases is difficult to estimate because the families are often too afraid to speak up.

Ms Książak told me she recently got a WhatsApp message informing her of the death a man she met in Brest who had been trying to cross the border. His wife says he was beaten to death. She too is afraid to make it public. On 8 June, former Chechen policeman Artur Aydamirov disappeared in Brest, after trying to apply for asylum at the border nine times. He fled Chechnya with his family when he learnt he was required to perform military service in Syria. According to Amnesty International, witnesses in Brest saw uniformed men force Aydamirov into a van and drive away. He has not been seen since.

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At the end of 2017, the Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw quashed several of the Border Guard decisions to deny entry to Chechen migrants seeking international protection. The attorneys representing the migrants believe that, slowly, they are opening a new legal path.

But for now, nothing changes for the desperate people in Brest. On a Sunday morning, the 8.18 am train to Terespol is full of people. Among them is Madina, hoping it will be sixth time lucky.

A few days later, then-Polish Minister of Interior, now Defence Minister, Mariusz Błaszczak said on television: “It is thanks to the fact that Poland does not accept refugees that we are a safe country. We will not repeat the errors of Europe.” No matter the human cost.

The Ministry of Interior was working on a decree that will see asylum seekers, including children, placed in container camps, though this particular idea seems to have been put on hold for now. Unsuccessful asylum applicants may be deported without the chance to appeal.

The day I leave Brest, I get a text message from Madina in the early evening. “I didn’t make it. Do you know a Polish man I could marry? I need to cross the border as soon as possible. Help me.”

This story was written as part of ‘Reporting Migration and Trafficking in the Western Balkans’, a journalism workshop run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.