The United States could subject Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to the same fate as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in order to convince Moscow to end the war in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky suggested on Wednesday.
“That’s an example with Maduro, right? (…) Let them carry out some kind of operation with (Ramzan) Kadyrov, with this murderer,” the President of Ukraine told journalists, the day after a summit in Paris between the Ukrainians and their Western allies.
He was referring to Washington’s shock military intervention on Saturday in which Nicolás Maduro and his wife were captured and forcibly taken to New York.
“Maybe (Vladimir) Putin will see this and think twice,” said Volodymyr Zelensky after putting forward the idea of targeting the Chechen leader as a new target.
Chechen soldiers sent to Ukraine
Former separatist turned loyalist of the Russian head of state, Ramzan Kadyrov rules Chechnya, a Russian republic in the Caucasus, with an iron fist. He applauded the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022, increasing threats against kyiv and its allies and sending thousands of Chechen soldiers to the front.
Accused of some of the main political assassinations of the last twenty years in Russia, Ramzan Kadyrov is also accused by NGOs of very serious human rights violations in his republic.
There have been many rumors in recent years that he is ill or dying. At the beginning of January, one of his close collaborators released a video in which he was seen with him to deny new allegations of his hospitalization in a Moscow clinic.
Volodymyr Zelensky had already reacted on Saturday to the American operation in Venezuela, this time by seeming to suggest that the Americans were targeting Vladimir Putin himself.
“About Venezuela? What can I say? If it is allowed to deal with dictators in this way, then the United States knows what to do next,” he said good-naturedly at a press conference.