KRAMATORSK, Ukraine—The horrors of Ukraine are an eerily familiar sight for Maga, a 30-year-old Chechen fighter who spoke with The Daily Beast using his codename.
“The same torture, the same mass graves…the things the Russians are doing in Ukraine, they were doing back in Chechnya,” Maga told The Daily Beast from his unit’s hideout in eastern Ukraine last month. “They just come and destroy everyone who could be against their power.”
Having fought first to defend Kyiv—and then in the battles for the liberation of the Kharkiv region—Maga said the atrocities he has seen in Putin’s invasion match stories told by his relatives, who fought in the wars for Chechen independence from the Russian Federation in the 1990s.
While much of the world was shocked by the bloody atrocities committed by Putin’s forces in cities like Mariupol and Bucha, for many Chechens, none of this came as a surprise.
Now, this shared trauma appears to have formed a bond between Chechens who have flocked to Ukraine to fight against Putin’s invasion and their new Ukrainian comrades, who have agreed that once the war is finished here, they will travel to fight for a free Chechnya.
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“If I am alive, I will participate in the liberation of Chechnya,” said Alexander, a 43-year-old Ukrainian fighting with the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion, who told The Daily Beast he was named after the first President of the independent Chechen Republic that was bombed into submission by Putin. “Why? Because for me they are brotherly people. I adopted a lot from them: the way they relate to life and death, the way they relate to the elders.” His beard, hair and clothing are cut in the local style—while he retains his Christian faith, he looks Chechen in all but name.Alexander and Maga’s battalion contain some of the around 1,000 Chechens fighting for Ukraine, seeing a direct line between Ukraine’s fight to liberate its territory and Chechnya’s struggle for independence. They invited The Daily Beast to visit their modest barracks in a small townhouse in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk to tell their stories.
A weapons collection in a barracks in Kramatorsk.
A weapons collection in a barracks in Kramatorsk.
Tom Mutch
Members of the battalion spoke with The Daily Beast on the condition their last names are omitted and their faces are not photographed. They have recently been fighting on the frontlines in Bakhmut, where they say that Russian tactics are just like those of the Soviets during the Second World War: “They throw and cover everything in meat and capture [territory] because they have a lot of this meat,” while caring nothing for the lives of their soldiers or Ukrainian civilians caught in the crossfire, one member said.
The group keeps a high-powered arsenal inside the townhouse, including 30 and 50-caliber machine guns, AK74 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Outside, some men were cooking meat on a barbeque, smoking cigarettes, checking their weapons and reloading their ammunition. A well-groomed puppy scurried around the yard snapping at bites of dropped food. One soldier’s patch featured Ukrainian blue and yellow colors, followed by a Quranic verse in Arabic. (The vast majority of Chechens are Muslim.)
A Ukrainian soldier roasts meat on a barbeque in a backyard in Kramatorsk.
