Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has shared footage of his men opening fire on an apartment block and shouting “Allah Akbar!” in Mariupol, the encircled coastal stronghold of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
The coastal city on the Sea of Azov is currently the scene of the fiercest fighting in the war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, with Mayor Vadym Boichenko describing “Tanks and machine-gun battles” in the street and “Everybody… hiding in bunkers” last night.
Mariupol is a key stronghold of the notorious Azov Battalion, a more or less openly neo-Nazi outfit bearing Waffen SS insignia founded as an irregular paramilitary force during the chaos of the Euromaidan revolution in 2014 but now incorporated formally into the official National Guard of Ukraine.
Long used by Russian propagandists as proof of their claim that the Ukraianian state is compromised by Nazi elements — despite having a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister — the Azov Battalion appeared to welcome news that Kadyrov, who rules the Checehn Republic of the Russian Federation virtually as a private fiefdom, was joining Vladimir Putin’s war effort, with the National Guard sharing footage of “Azov fighters” greasing bullets in pig fat for the “Kadyrov orcs”.
Kadyrov, who fought against Moscow during a jihadist insurrection in the mid-1990s but switched sides during another conflict at the turn of the century, runs Chechnya along broadly Islamist lines, and the republic’s mufti has declared that Chechens who join the fight in Ukraine are “on the path of Allah”.
A social media aficionado, the Chechen leader has already shared unsettling video footage which he claims shows the “Nazis of Ukraine” being subject to “reeducation” on the battlefield, and warned that “naive” Azov members who throw away their insignia will not escape his clutches as “Your lists with names, photos and addresses have long been with us!”
He has conceded that the “liberation” of Mariupol “is not happening as fast as everyone would like,” however, alleging that this is because the “Azov people… occupy the upper floors of residential buildings in order to later accuse Russian troops of shooting at civilians, merge with local residents, [and] change into civilian clothes, in order to shamefully escape later.”
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