Vladimir Putin’s handpicked leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, is a corrupt and merciless dictator whose growing political ambitions pose a serious danger to Russia’s future, a damning opposition report has claimed.

The 65-page report, called A National Security Threat, was presented in Moscow by its author, Ilya Yashin, a close friend of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, and a leading figure in the latter’s RPR-Parnas political party. Nemtsov was killed while walking with his girlfriend across a bridge near the Kremlin in February last year.

Alongside allegations of secret prisons, routine-vote rigging in favour of Putin, and the plunder of Russia’s national budget, the report also details Kadyrov’s possible involvement in a spate of apparently politically motivated killings of journalists, human rights activists, and political opponents, including that of Nemtsov.



Yashin’s report also questions why Putin has allowed Kadyrov to assemble a 30,000-strong, heavily armed private army, commonly known as the Kadyrovtsy.



“If we stay silent, one day we will wake up and the Kadyrovtsy will control Russia,” Yashin warned at Tuesday’s presentation, which took place at RPR-Parnas’s headquarters in central Moscow, just a short walk from where Nemtsov was gunned down.

While Kadyrov denied any links to the murder, he was quick to praise the suspected gunman, a former Chechen police officer named Zaur Dadayev, as a “genuine Russian patriot”. Putin awarded Kadyrov a state honour shortly after Nemtsov’s death.

“I have no doubt that Kadyrov was behind the murder of Nemtsov,” Yashin told the Guardian in an interview before the presentation. “I’m not sure if he was the last link in the chain, but I have no doubt of his direct involvement. No one in Chechnya would have dared carry out such a high-profile killing without his approval, at the very least.

“Putin has created a problem that he does not know how to solve. Chechnya today is a quasi-Islamic state within the Russian federation that does not obey Russian rules, and whose only connection with the federal authorities is the systematic receipt of money from the federal budget. Russian society stays silent because people are afraid of Kadyrov. And he exploits this fear as an instrument to muffle critics.”

Suspected pro-Kadyrov activists twice attempted to disrupt Tuesday’s presentation. One lunged at Yashin, screaming: “Kadyrov has done much more for Russia than you, bastard”, while another threw a pile of fake dollars. Russia’s beleaguered opposition frequently faces accusations that it is in the pay of western intelligence services.

Both men were bundled away by security guards. Shortly after, police began evacuating the building, citing a bomb threat. Yashin initially refused to leave, and accused police of acting on orders to close down the opposition event.

While the much-anticipated report is drawn mainly from open sources, this is the first time such a well-compiled and thorough examination of Kadyrov’s alleged rule of terror has been made public.

The 39-year-old former separatist fighter has been the de facto ruler of Chechnya since 2004, when his father and the republic’s then president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed in a bomb attack in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Kremlin critics allege he has since been given free rein by Putin to run the volatile mountainous republic as a generously funded personal fiefdom in return for suppressing separatist and Islamist forces there.

But while Kadyrov frequently professes his personal devotion to Putin, there are concerns that Moscow’s hold over the republic is weakening. Last year, Kadyrov ordered Chechen security forces to “shoot to kill” if they encountered police officers from other Russian regions on the territory of the republic. He later retracted his comments.



Kadyrov attempted to laugh off Tuesday’s report as “nothing but idle chatter” and even posted it on his many social network accounts before its official release. He reportedly gained access to the report after an opposition website mistakenly published it early.

The report comes after a series of threats issued by Kadyrov and his allies towards opposition figures. Earlier this year, he called Putin’s opponents jackals and enemies of the people, and suggested they should be committed to psychiatric hospitals. He also posted a video on Instagram that depicted Mikhail Kasyanov, the RPR-Parnas co-leader and former prime minister, in a sniper’s crosshairs. Days after that incident, Kasyanov was assaulted in a Moscow restaurant by suspected Kadyrov loyalists.

Despite what he said were concerns about his personal safety, Yashin insisted he would continue his public opposition to both Putin and Kadyrov.



“If I said I wasn’t afraid of anything, then this would be false and mere bravado,” Yashin told the Guardian. “But we have to keep fighting. If we don’t, the only other option is to leave Russia. And I have no intention of leaving.”



“We are opposing a corrupt, dangerous regime that poses a threat to Russia and Chechnya,” Yashin said at a press conference, which police tried to break up after a bomb warning.“Today’s regime in Chechnya you can describe as a personal rule.”