The public schoolboy Chechen fighter, his gun-toting wife and a failed assassination
“I CHECKED you out when you got in touch,” chuckles Adam Osmayev, the former British public school pupil who became a Chechen field commander, as he sits down in a sushi restaurant in Kiev. “I know you’re not going to kill me.”
It is said jokingly, but he and his wife, Amina Okueva, are also both wearing bulletproof vests under their clothes. There is no escaping an unspoken and slightly awkward context to our meeting: the last time Mr Osmayev met someone he thought was a Western journalist, the interview ended with the reporter shooting him, and Ms Okueva shooting the reporter.
As she orders chocolate cake and tea, Ms Okueva laughs and confirms that she is also carrying a concealed handgun – and a much better one than she used to put three rounds into the man “from Le Monde”.
“A Glock is a very fine weapon,” she says. “Very quick. Better than a Makarov.” She later reveals that her cat is also called Glock.
The tale of the botched assassination on June 1 has all the elements of a paperback thriller: a meticulously constructed cover story, a charismatic killer, and – for Mr Osmayev and Ms Okueva – an improbable escape.
The couple are among the most well known of the handful of Chechen exiles still fighting for a separatist cause that was crushed when the Russian army won the second Chechen war in the early 2000s. Although they disavow any connection with the jihadist elements of the North Caucasus insurgency, they are open about taking up arms against Russia and Ramzan Kadyrov, the current Kremlin-backed Chechen president.
Mr Osmayev’s unlikely journey from the playing fields of a British public school to the battlegrounds of east Ukraine – by way of an Interpol arrest warrant and a spell in jail for trying to kill Vladimir Putin – has been told more than once.
Ms Okueva, a 33 year old doctorturned-sniper who claims to have killed “several dozen” enemy soldiers in eastern Ukraine and was publicly presented with a pistol by the country’s interior minister in recognition of her combat service, is well known in her own right.
The correspondent who contacted them this summer seemed interested in both their stories.
“He said his name was Alex Werner. He was speaking Russian very well but with a French accent. And he had a business card with the logo of Le
Monde on it,” said Mr Osmayev. Werner (not, it later turned out, his real name) was sympathetic, well spoken, and like many foreign correspondents following Ukraine, preoccupied with the war and whether the government of Petro Poroshenko, the president, is failing to deliver on promises to crack down on corruption. He was also charming.
“At our first meeting, he brought Amina flowers. But she doesn’t like flowers. She has this joke for everyone, you know: ‘Ammo would be a better present for me,’” said Mr Osmayev in accented English. “And he said ‘Oh, really? I know what I’ll give you. I have just the thing’.”
“He was a very very good actor. And his confidence, actually you know, fooled us,” admitted Mr Osmayev.
It was at their fourth meeting, as they waited in a car for a supposed meeting at the French embassy, that Werner presented his “gift”.
Producing a shiny red gift box embossed with gold lettering, he asked the couple to sit in the back seats so he could “film their reaction”.
But it was only when he opened the box to reveal a loaded semi-automatic pistol that Mr Osmayev realised they had been trapped in the vehicle.
Both men lunged for the weapon at the same time, he recalled, the assassin grabbing the handle and Mr Osmayev the barrel. Mr Osmayev was shot through the wrist and the right nipple before the weapon jammed. Ms Okueva drew her own pistol, pumped several rounds into the would-be assassin, and stuffed her husband’s wounds with Celox, a clotting agent used by military medics.
Mr Osmayev lost three pints of blood and had bullet holes in his right lung, his liver, and his wrist, but was soon out of hospital. Ms Okueva, who the interior minister awarded a second pistol for her actions, says only her husband’s quick reactions bought enough time to fire back.
“Werner” survived the shoot-out. Ukrainian police named him as Artur Denisultanov-kurmakayev, an ethnic Chechen once known to St Petersburg’s criminal underworld, and who is believed to have worked for Mr Kadyrov. In interviews from prison he has denied attempted murder. He had no connection to Le Monde.
The attack on Mr Osmayev was one of several recent high-profile assassination attempts in the Ukrainian capital.
Since summer 2016, a series of car bombings and shootings have claimed the lives of Pavel Sheremet, a renowned independent journalist, Denis Voronenkov, a renegade Russian MP, and Col Maksym Shapoval, a senior military intelligence officer.
The most recent killing came on Sept 9, when Timur Makhauri, an ethnic Chechen citizen of Georgia, was blown up in a car bombing.
Asked who he thinks Kurmakayev was working for, Mr Osmayev said: “The Russian FSB. These guys really think that I did plot to kill Vladimir Putin and before that Ramzan Kadyrov.” While he doesn’t admit that the Russians might have good reason for such suspicions, he doesn’t entirely deny it either.
Born in Grozny in the Eighties, Mr Osmayev is the son of a high-ranking official in Chechnya’s Soviet-era oil industry. In 1994, a few months before the outbreak of the first bloody war between Chechen separatists and Boris Yeltsin’s government, Mr Osmayev’s father sent his 13-year-old son off to get what he viewed as “the best education in the world” at Wycliffe College, a public school in the Cotswolds. He left with three As at A-level before enrolling at the University of Buckingham, but dropped out after the second Chechen War broke out in 1999.
It was then, he says, that he began his career with what he calls “the resistance” – the armed Chechen separatist insurgency – by couriering “people, messages, weapons” around the war-torn republic.
After being accused in 2007 of plotting to kill Mr Kadyrov he fled to the Odessa, Ukraine.
There he met Ms Okueva, a fellow Chechen studying at the city’s medical school, and lived incognito until in 2012 he gained worldwide notoriety for another alleged assassination plot – this time against Vladimir Putin.
He spent two years in a Ukrainian jail before charges were dropped and he was released in 2014. He then joined a group of Chechen fighters serving on the Ukrainian side in the war with Russian-backed separatists in the east of the country.
“The court here said there was no evidence for it,” he said, when asked if there was any truth to the Russian allegations. “It was based on the testimony of one guy.” He retracted his confession because it was obtained under duress after police threatened to arrest friends and relatives, he said.
Sure. But that’s not quite the same as a denial, is it?
He pauses, and Ms Okueva breaks in: “Everyone would like to kill Putin,” she says with a small laugh. “That’s normal.”
‘At our first meeting, he brought Amina flowers. But she doesn’t like flowers. She has this joke, you know: ‘Ammo would be a better present for me’’