How realistic is it that Kadyrov will send troops to Ukraine, and could there be as many as 84,000? — Denysenko
Kremlin puppet Ramzan Kadyrov is preparing to send 84,000
Kadyrovites to Ukraine, according to the National Resistance Center. Political
scientist Vadym Denysenko discussed the plausibility of this claim during an
interview on Radio NV.
Вадим Денисенко
“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.”
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