Meet the Chechen battalion that joined the Ukrainians to fight the Russians
Mansur was 13 years old when his village Samashki was destroyed by Russian troops during Chechnya’s first war for independence against Russia.
Running a flamethrower, the Russians burned Mansour’s neighbors alive in their homes, threw grenades into the basement and killed the men. Four years later, a truce broke out, and Mansoor returned to war. He says that he was never the same after that.
40-year-old Mansoor says, “Russia ruined my everything. I grew up with war and war shaped me in every way.
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Mansour is one of more than 200,000 Chechens who fled Turkey and Europe in the 2000s during the Second War between Russian federal forces and fighters in Chechnya, a republic in far southern Russia.
Leaving his home did not mean giving up his fight against Russia. “If I had been born in the US or Canada, I would not have come here to Ukraine. But because Russia took everything from me, I had to protest. Nothing else matters,” Mansour says.
Today, Mansour is deputy commander of the Sheikh Mansour Battalion (no relation), one of at least two all-Chechen battalions fighting in Ukraine against Russia. These Chechens are among 20,000 foreign fighters whom the Ukrainian government estimated had joined their forces near the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early March.
Chechens have a history of conflict with the Russians
Ethnic Russians and Chechens have clashed fiercely in border conflicts from time to time since the 18th century. Russian imperial troops regularly plundered Chechen settlements in a bloody ethnic cleansing against Chechen civilians. During Joseph Stalin’s rule of the Soviet Union, about 400,000 Chechens and ethnic Ingush were forcibly deported from their homeland in the North Caucasus.
By the time survivors under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev were allowed to return to their lands 13 years later, the difficulty of resettlement and violence resulted in 30% of the deaths.
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After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia brutally destroyed a nascent Chechen Republic. The first war for independence ended in a peace ceasefire, only to be dissolved in 1999 after Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, reportedly led a new military operation in Chechnya to counter terrorists. Historians now say that the allegations may have been exaggerated or fabricated.
“We lost our homeland. What else does a person have to lose? Our family or children are not important when we have lost our home, and the whole world was silent,” he says.
Members of the Sheikh Mansour battalion say it has been instrumental in settling a 400-year-old blood feud that began in the 1700s, when the Russian Tsar moved to the North Caucasus where Chechens live.
The Chechens say they are ready to fight against the Russian army as well as other ethnic Chechen soldiers sent to fight on the Russian side.
Pro-Kyiv Chechen fighters who spoke with NPR declined to disclose their numbers in Ukraine, citing security concerns, in particular from the Kremlin-backed Chechens. That’s why he gave only his first name or no name at all. But he says his battalion numbers at least hundreds of men – all shaped by trauma and driven by hatred of Russia.
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Meet the Chechen battalion that joined the Ukrainians to fight the RussiansIn Ukraine, Russian troops have shot civilians, indiscriminately shelling schools and apartment buildings and terrorizing towns and villages. However, Chechen soldiers say that they were not surprised by these horrors. They believe that they have already experienced very bad things.
“The tragedies in Ukraine at Bucha and Mariupol are nothing compared to what we experienced growing up. The Russians leveled our cities and villages to the ground,” says another soldier from Mansour’s battalion. before it was destroyed by Russian bombing in the early 2000s.
“This is our dream. And we will pass this dream from one generation to the next until this evil is destroyed,” says the soldier.
Overall, the Chechens are divided on whether to fight for or against Russia. In 2006, Moscow appointed pro-Russian leader Ramzan Kadyrov to rule Chechnya, and Kadyrov pledged his support and loyalty to Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Kadyrov has claimed that Chechen fighters loyal to Russia have been sent to Ukraine to fight for Putin, meaning that it is entirely possible that Chechens are now fighting Chechens.
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Meet the Chechen battalion that joined the Ukrainians to fight the Russians
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by News East India staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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