Putin’s ‘foot soldier’ voices dismay over performance of Russian army
Highlighting how Russia’s retreat is raising pressure on the Kremlin, Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of Chechnya and a staunch loyalist of President Vladimir Putin, criticized the Russian army’s leadership Sunday and voiced his dismay over its performance in northeastern Ukraine.
In a voice message posted overnight on Telegram, a messaging app, Kadyrov told his 2.4 million followers that the Russian Defense Ministry had “made mistakes” and accused Russian authorities of failing to explain the retreat to the public.
Claiming “full awareness” of the reality of what Moscow has declined to call a war, Kadyrov said: “If today or tomorrow no changes are made in the strategy of the special military operation, I would need to speak to the Defense Ministry’s leadership and to the country’s leadership to explain to them the real situation on the ground.”
Kadyrov’s statement reflected a sense of shock that has spread throughout Russian conservative circles, as news flows in of Russian forces abandoning one strategic stronghold after another in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.
Many nationalist military bloggers, who have helped shape the narrative of the war inside Russia, cited the contrast between the apparent collapse of the Russian front line in Ukraine and fireworks and celebrations in Moscow on Saturday to commemorate the anniversary of the city’s founding.
The celebrations looked “blasphemous and wild,” one blogger wrote.
But Kadyrov is the first high-ranking official to openly criticize the Russian army over the Ukrainian offensive.
Calling himself Putin’s “foot soldier,” Kadyrov has used his shows of fervent loyalty to the Kremlin to carve out a degree of autonomy in his often brutal rule over Chechnya, a predominantly Muslim border region in the North Caucasus, and the Kremlin affords him more latitude in his public statements than other Russian regional leaders.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Kadyrov has sent Chechen troops to join the fighting, posting video updates from the battlefield. Kadyrov insisted in his latest address that Russia would retake all the Ukrainian territory it had lost.
But his pronouncements appeared to be contradicted by Russia’s hasty pullback from parts of Ukraine’s northeast that it had held for months, the latest sign of Moscow appearing to narrow its war aims in the face of staunch Ukrainian resistance.