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MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday made an unscheduled visit to Chechnya, a Muslim-majority republic within the Russian Federation, his first trip in nearly 13 years, as tensions in Ukraine mount. Cross-border penetration into western Russia She entered her third week.
Putin was received by Chechen dignitaries. Ramzan Kadyrov is the powerful leader who gave himself this name.Before visiting a special forces academy bearing his name and talking to volunteer fighters who train there before being deployed to Ukraine.
Putin praised the volunteers and said that as long as Russia had men like them it would remain “invincible,” according to reports from Russian state agencies.
More than 47,000 fighters, including volunteers, have trained at the facility since Moscow began what it called a “special military operation” in Ukraine, Kadyrov said in a post on his official Telegram channels.
Fighters from Chechnya, whose attempts at independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to years of war with Russian government forces, are taking part in both sides of the conflict In Ukraine.
Pro-Kiev volunteers loyal to Dzhokhar Dudayev, the late pro-independence Chechen leader, are sworn enemies of the Chechen forces that back Putin and Kadyrov, who joined Russia in a months-long siege of Ukraine’s main port of Mariupol and other flashpoints in the south and east of the country.
Putin also visited the grave of Kadyrov's father, former Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov, a command center and a mosque in the local capital Grozny on Tuesday.
At the end of the day, he held talks with the Chechen leader, who said the republic had “tens of thousands” of reservists ready to fight the Ukrainians, according to Russian state media reports. The reports did not specify whether any of those might be sent to repel a Kyiv advance into Russia’s Kursk region.
The Kremlin has relied on Kadyrov to maintain stability in the North Caucasus after years of unrest. International human rights groups have accused Kadyrov’s security forces of extrajudicial killings, torture and abductions of opponents, but Russian authorities have rejected repeated demands for investigations.
The Kremlin has sent fighters from Chechnya to help protect Moscow from Failed rebellion launched by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin But some commentators have warned that Kadyrov's ambitions could also pose a potential threat to federal authorities.
By Tuesday evening, neither the Kremlin nor Kadyrov had shared any details about the purpose and timing of Putin's unexpected visit, with Kadyrov saying only that a “busy schedule” awaited the Russian leader.
Putin later held talks with Kadyrov at the Chechen leader's residence in Grozny.
Before his surprise visit to Chechnya, Putin was earlier Tuesday in Beslan, a town in the North Ossetia region of the Caucasus, where he held his first meeting in nearly two decades with mothers of children killed in armed clashes in Chechnya. A 2004 school attack by Islamist militants killed more than 330 people..
At the meeting, Putin criticized Kyiv's incursion into Russia's Kursk region, accusing Ukrainians of “trying to destabilize” the country.
“We will punish the criminals, there is no doubt about that,” he added.
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