Fighters of Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion oppose Putin and his strongman Ramzan Kadyrov as they battle with Ukrainian prejudice
in the eastern city of Bakhmut, if the Chechen volunteers’ Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion was a football club it would be Millwall. Nobody likes us, their fans sing, and “we don’t care”, says Tor, 38, with a laugh.
The Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion is one of those fighting with Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Ukrainian forces, as they have since Russia first invaded eastern Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. Named after the first post-Soviet president of independent, known as the Republic of Ichkeria, it was created as a “peacekeeping battalion – so rest in peace, Russians,” says Tor.
The perception of Chechens inside Ukraine is “very bad”, says Tor, poisoned by the reputation of Kadyrov’s regime and the propaganda pumped out by Moscow, including over the supposed threat of “radical Islamism” that they are said to pose. “For more than 30 years, nonstop propaganda against us. [They say] we are barbarians, we are animals, we are predators, we cannot speak normally.”
He keeps an understandably low profile today. In October 2017, Osmaev was wounded and his wife, a sniper in the battalion, was killed when suspected Russian secret service agents opened fire on them with a Kalashnikov rifle as they returned by car to their house outside Kyiv. For the last two weeks they have been in Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region. The fighting is house to house, says a staff sergeant who goes by the call sign Maga. “There are no defensive positions [for the Ukrainians] because there are these five-floor buildings and the Russians destroyed them one by one,” he adds. “They Russians have lots of heavy artillery and the Ukrainian army does not have enough to keep all these positions. Not enough mortars to keep the Russians back.
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