Brutal sect of Chechens executed Russian troops in Ukraine, claim witnesses

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A brutal sect of feared Chechen soldiers executed ‘heavily wounded’ Russian troops in a ‘field hospital’ that was situated northwest of Bucha, eyewitnesses have claimed.

The Kadyrovtsy, who have been used as a PR tool in Vladimir Putin‘s war, allegedly murdered their own comrades and ‘operated a torture chamber’ in a glass factory on Yablonska Street – confirming previous reports by Ukraine‘s ombudsman for human rights, Lyudmila Denisova.

Artem Hurin, a member of the city council of the neighboring town of Irpin who also serves as a deputy commander in Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, was one of the first to visit Borodyanka, northwest of Bucha, after the Putin’s soldiers retreated last month when Ukrainian forces recaptured the town on April 2.

He said: ‘They would bring heavily wounded Russian soldiers to a big hospital they had there, and those who were very heavily wounded, they would just shoot them. No one other than the Kadyrovtsy did this.’ 

Hurin recalled the litany of horrifying stories from residents who were tortured and raped by lawless Russian troops and saw evidence of ‘executed civilians’ who lay dead on the street, the Daily Beast reports. 

According to residents of the town, the killer squad of Chechen fighters – known as Kadyrovtsy – had executed people as early as March 5. 

The revelations came as Ukraine said the first group of civilians were safely evacuated from the steel plant in the besieged city of Mariupol on Saturday night.

A Ukrainian fighter, who had sheltered in the network of underground rooms and tunnels located underneath the factory since mid-April, said a group of around 20 women and children had managed to get out – but a reported 1,000 people are currently still stuck underneath the plant.

Sviatoslav Palamar, Azov regiment deputy commander, told Reuters: ‘We are getting civilians out of the rubble with ropes – it’s the elderly, women and children.’

One woman recalled how she endured four days of torture by one Kadyrovtsy soldier and one Belarusian soldier before they brutally shot her husband in the head.

Meanwhile, the Bucha Mayor, Anatoliy Fedoruk, claimed Chechen troops tied white bands around prisoners’ arms who were captured, which were similar to those found on the bodies of executed civilians in the city.

Opening up about civilians who attempted to leave their homes to get food and water, Hurin added: ‘They didn’t allow them to do anything. There they just killed people through binoculars for example. They just shot them.’ 

Many Chechen soldiers were fighting alongside the Russian military, which waged two wars against Chechnya – a Muslim republic in southern Russia – between 1994 and 2000. 

As the towns around Kyiv which were recaptured by Ukrainian forces have revealed horrific atrocities, with the bodies of hundreds of dead civilians piled up after Putin withdrew his band of thugs.

Russia has denied targeting civilians despite the many stories of gang rape, sexual abuse in front of children, torture and executions to emerge from the barbaric war.

A United Nations mission to Bucha documented ‘the unlawful killing, including by summary execution, of some 50 civilians there’, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said.

Forensic tests carried out on civilian corpses dumped in mass graves in the Kyiv region show women were raped before being brutally killed.

Dozens of autopsies have been carried out on mutilated corpses from Bucha, Irpin and Borodianka, with many showing signs of torture and multiple bullet holes in the back.

Some have been so badly disfigured or even decapitated that investigators have been unable to identify them.

Vladyslav Pirovskyi, a Ukrainian forensic doctor who carried out the autopsies, told The Guardian: ‘We already have a few cases which suggest that these women had been raped before being shot to death. 

‘We can’t give more details as my colleagues are still collecting the data and we still have hundreds of bodies to examine.’

His team has been analysing 15 bodies a day, with most killed by automatic gunfire.

He added: ‘There are many burnt bodies, and heavily disfigured bodies that are just impossible to identify.

‘The face could be smashed into pieces, you can’t put it back together, sometimes there’s no head at all.’

The evidence has been passed on to the region’s senior prosecutor, Oleh Tkalenko, for further investigations.

This comes as a group of Chechen fighters were seen firing heavy machine guns towards residential buildings in Ukraine’s besieged city of Mariupol, on a video released on TikTok last month.

The footage, shared by Kremlin-allied Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, also showed the Chechen soldiers seemingly celebrating as the camera panned to show the hollowed-out shells of destroyed apartment blocks.

The soldiers, dressed in camouflaged military gear, pumped their fists to the camera and could be heard shouting ‘allahu akbar’.

On his Telegram channel, Kadyrov claimed his fighters were clearing ‘the territory of the Nazis’ – parroting a line used by President Putin and his propaganda machine to justify the invasion of Ukraine.

Mariupol has seen some of the most intense fighting since Putin ordered his armies into Ukraine on February 24. Russian forces have been shelling the city indiscriminately, razing large swathes of the city.

Officials say at least 2,400 civilians have been killed in the southern port city, but it is feared that the true toll is much higher. One official said earlier this month that he feared as many as 20,000 people could have been killed.

The Chechen military is known for its Hollywood-inspired videos claiming to show their soldiers in action, while actually showing them doing very little. Experts say the videos are just another branch of Putin’s propaganda efforts. 

Kadyrov’s video also showed his soldiers climbing through the window of a building, seemingly to help a civilian out. However, while the soldiers were passing a mattress between then, the footage did not actually show anyone being carried.

Instead, one grinning fighter wearing sunglasses panned his camera around to show the scene of devastation around him, in a style that – anywhere else in the world – could be mistaken with a selfie-video from an Instagram influencer.

In a separate TikTok video released in March, Chechen special forces were filmed fighting house-to-house in besieged Mariupol while ‘hundreds’ of women and children remained trapped in the rubble of a city theatre destroyed by Russian invaders.

The footage, said to have been released by pro-Putin Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, shows heavily armed fighters from the region pounding a high-rise building in the bombed-out city during a fierce gunfight with Ukrainian soldiers.

The propaganda video then cuts before showing some of the Chechen fighters emerging from the building with children in their arms while supposedly ‘liberating’ civilians.

The video emerged as hundreds of people were still feared trapped under the rubble of a theatre in the devastated city that has been obliterated by Russian forces who control the overwhelming majority of the city and are mostly focusing their airstrikes on the Soviet-era steel plant located close to the harbour, where a contingent of between 1,000-2000 Ukrainian soldiers are staging a desperate holdout alongside roughly 1,000 civilians.

Chechen troops have been embedded in the National Guard of Russia and have been fighting in Ukraine since the start of the invasion. 

One squad of Kadyrov’s fighters was reportedly sent to try and assassinate Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, but was destroyed by Ukraine’s forces.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky switched into Russian in his nightly video address to urge Russian soldiers not to fight in Ukraine, saying even their generals expected that thousands of them would die.

He said Russia has been recruiting new troops ‘with little motivation and little combat experience’ for the units that were gutted during the early weeks of the war so these units can be thrown back into battle.

He said Russian commanders fully understand that thousands of them will die and thousands more will be wounded in the coming weeks.

‘The Russian commanders are lying to their soldiers when they tell them they can expect to be held seriously responsible for refusing to fight and then also don’t tell them, for example, that the Russian army is preparing additional refrigerator trucks for storing the bodies,’ Mr Zelensky said late on Saturday.

‘They don’t tell them about the new losses the generals expect. Every Russian soldier can still save his own life. It’s better for you to survive in Russia than to perish on our land.’

It comes as Sweden said a Russian military plane violated Swedish airspace. The incident happened late on Friday in the Baltic Sea near the island of Bornholm.

In a statement on Saturday, the Swedish Armed Forces said a Russian AN-30 propeller plane flew toward Swedish airspace and briefly entered it before leaving the area.

The Swedish Air Force scrambled fighter jets which photographed the Russian plane.

Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist told Swedish public radio that the violation was ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unprofessional’.

In a similar incident in early March four Russian warplanes violated Swedish airspace over the Baltic Sea.

Sweden and neighbouring Finland are both considering Nato membership following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Moscow has warned that such a move would have consequences, without giving specifics.

Meanwhile, Russia has been forced to merge and redeploy depleted and disparate units from failed advances in northeast Ukraine, a British military update said on Saturday.

‘Shortcomings in Russian tactical coordination remain. A lack of unit-level skills and inconsistent air support have left Russia unable to fully leverage its combat mass, despite localised improvements,’ the military tweeted.

‘Russia hopes to rectify issues that have previously constrained its invasion by geographically concentrating combat power, shortening supply lines and simplifying command and control,’ it said.