Ramzan Kadyrov attends a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, 21 October 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE / EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA 

Ramzan Kadyrov, the brutal warlord installed by the Kremlin to run Chechnya, has claimed that several Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed in a Ukrainian drone strike on the Russian Special Forces University in the Chechen city of Gudermes on Tuesday.

“By trying to harm us, Kyiv has killed its own soldiers today,” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram, while stressing that there had been “no casualties from our side”, before adding that there were “up to 10 Ukrainian POWs at each strategic facility in the republic, including the Russian Special Forces University.”

The drone strike caused the roof of the Russian Special Forces University, which is named in honour of Vladimir Putin, to catch fire on Tuesday morning. In his initial statement after the strike, however, Kadyrov said the building had been “empty” at the time of the attack and that nobody had been injured.

Neither the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) nor the Russian Defence Ministry have yet commented on the incident.

This is the first drone strike of its kind to have been officially acknowledged by the Chechen authorities. In another statement to Chechen TV on Tuesday, Kadyrov vowed to take retribution against the AFU, saying that he had issued an order to all Chechen commanders on the front line in Ukraine “not to take prisoners”.

A Ukrainian intelligence source told 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.

The source added that the attack was likely tied to the ongoing feud between Kadyrov and lawmakers from both Dagestan and Ingushetia after a failed Chechen-led raid on Russia’s biggest online retailer Wildberries was repelled by Ingush security guards in September.