How realistic is it that Kadyrov will send troops to Ukraine, and could there be as many as 84,000? — Denysenko

“In my view, this figure seems quite mythical. We all understand that Kadyrov has kept his people safe — everything possible was done to ensure that his people fought and died minimally at the front. There was indeed a spike in deaths among Chechens in 2022, but that soon dropped off dramatically. I rely on data from the Russian publication Mediazona, which closely monitors Russian military fatalities in Ukraine. That’s the first point. 

The second point: What does 84,000 people mean? That is nearly a three-month norm for recruiting contractors in the Russian Federation. Their plan is to gather 30,000 people each month, but they are gathering slightly fewer — around 25,000 to 26,000. So, he is essentially claiming a three-month recruitment norm of volunteer fighters, which also seems quite mythical to me. 

The third point: We cannot even speak about Chechens in general, because the population of Chechnya, according to official data as of 2024, is 1.55 million people. A little more than half are women, meaning there are about 750,000 men. Among them, there are about 200,000 children. So, to imagine that out of 500,000 adult men (plus a considerable number over 16), 85,000 would be going to war from Chechnya is impossible under any circumstances. 

And the final point: Even if he has gathered something, I think that this is a) an exaggeration, b) he obviously declared a figure that is mythical in terms of Russian realities. This number is more of a PR figure than a real possibility. 

Just to give you an idea: the group of Russian troops in Kursk currently consists of 50,000 people. In Donbas (I could be mistaken), there are over 200,000 people. Can you imagine that this is supposedly a third of the combat units of the Russian army now gathered by volunteers? The total Russian army is about 1.6 million strong. Honestly, all of this looks quite dubious to me. 

He has clearly summed up everything that could be summed up (and I wouldn’t be surprised if even from the First Chechen War the number of people involved in combat operations was counted) and said, ‘we have so many volunteers.’ But where are these people? We surely would have seen them, honestly, in military camps on the territory of Chechnya, if there were indeed 85,000 of them.”