Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov has been hospitalized in “critical condition,” according to Ukrainian intelligence officials, raising the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin could lose one of his most notorious subordinates.
"We can confirm that he has had another severe exacerbation and has been in critical condition for the past few days,” Ukrainian Defense Intelligence spokesman Andrii Yusov told local journalists on Friday.
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Kadyrov’s condition has been the subject of contradictory rumors in recent weeks, and Ukrainian officials have stoked the perception that he has a dangerous drug addiction. His health status has not been verified independently.
“At least once similar rumors circulated more than half a year ago,” a senior European official told the Washington Examiner on condition of anonymity. “But if [Ukrainian intelligence is] mentioning ... who knows?”
Yusov was emphatic.
“The information is confirmed from various sources in medical and political circles,” he told Obozrevatel, a Ukrainian publication. “Other details need further clarification. He has been ill for a long time, and it's about systemic health problems. But he has been in serious condition for the past few days.”
Kadyrov disputed such claims in August while reiterating his loyalty to Putin, just days after the death of Wagner Group chief executive Yevgeny Prigozhin.
"And I am ready to carry out any order from Vladimir Vladimirovich, even if the result is death," Kadyrov wrote on Telegram, where he published a picture of himself smiling with his Kremlin overlord. "Yes, I can die suddenly when I find out that there is someone more devoted than me in the matter of respect for our president, to whom, by the way, I owe my life. And not once, but twice.”
In any case, the swirl of speculation has raised hopes in Kyiv that Putin might have to manage a crisis in Chechnya, which threw off Kremlin rule during the First Chechen War, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and then lost independence again after Putin came to power.
“I would like to believe he ... might just pass away because he's one of the strongest supporters and loyalists” of Putin, said Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Merezhko, who chairs the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “If he's gone, it creates opportunities for resistance in Chechnya.”
Kadyrov has gained prominence in Ukraine throughout the escalation of the war, but his role as an important Kremlin ally long predates the conflict. Kadyrov’s family has dominated Chechnya since they abandoned their compatriots in the Second Chechen War to fight on behalf of Putin, who regarded the loss of Chechnya as “a continuation of the collapse of the USSR.” Putin forestalled that prospect in part by securing the services first of Akhmat Kadyrov and then his son and using them as a front-line proxy against other Chechen forces.
“Unfortunately, Kadyrov is a traitor, and of course if you asked us about it, we would have never allowed someone like Kadyrov to represent the Chechen people,” Chechen Sheikh Mansur Battalion commander Sheikh Mansur told Al Arabiya last year. “Putin has actually bought Kadyrov. He fed him a lavish meal, then ordered him to go and invade Ukraine.”
Mansur leads a Chechen force fighting on behalf of Ukraine; the Ukrainian parliament thanked them by passing a resolution last year that declared the Chechen Republic Of Ichkeria to be “temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation” in a salute the Chechen nationalists declared independence from Moscow in 1991.
“I have created a group among members of parliament called a Free Ichkeria,’” Merezhko said. “And I hope that if Kadyrov is gone, it creates a window of opportunity for people like them to start a war for national liberation in Chechnya.”
Kadyrov has a reputation for buffoonery in Western circles, earned in part through his penchant for cartoonish propaganda videos apparently intended to burnish his reputation as a strongman. Yet the Chechen people have also learned his capacity for brutality, which was recorded for the wider world by the late Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006 while investigating acts of torture perpetrated by Kadyrov’s forces.
There will doubtless be a scramble to sort through the rumors about his current health status. A Russian Telegram channel claimed this week that Kadyrov’s former health minister, who is reputed to have resigned in October 2022, actually was murdered on suspicion of administering poisonous injections to Kadyrov under the cover of providing medical treatment.
On the other hand, Ukrainian Defense Intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov has claimed Kadyrov is prone to "excessive drug use.” Similarly, there were unverified claims on social media, attributed to Chechen nationalist accounts, that he was found wandering in his pajamas around Grozny, the Chechen capital, “under the strong influence of narcotic substances” and transported by Russian FSB officials to Moscow.
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Merezhko, for his part, acknowledged that his Chechen contacts “say that there is no confirmation that Kadyrov is in critical condition,” and they are wary of amplifying rumors that might prove false.
“So his death might lead to rebellion and guerrilla war in Chechnya, which would be good for Ukraine, for strategic reasons [and] it would distract attention of Russia — in part, at least — from the front in the territory of Ukraine,” Merezhko said. “But at the same time, I've tried to be very careful. Until it is confirmed, I don't believe completely that [report] -- he might be sick, but I don't think that he is dying.”