Last week, a journalist from the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Elena Milashina, and human rights lawyer Alexander Nemov were assaulted while on their way to court in Grozny, Chechnya’s regional capital.

Their car was stopped by armed assailants, who have not yet been identified, who violently attacked and threatened to kill them. Milashina sustained a brain injury and multiple fractures, while Nemov was stabbed in the leg.

Milashina, who previously reported on the persecutions of LGBTIQ people in Chechnya, and Nemov had been travelling to attend the sentencing of 53-year-old Zarema Musayeva, the mother of two prominent Chechen dissidents, Abubakar and Ibragim Yangulbaev.

Both men, although they have some differences in their politics and their approaches, are among the most vocal critics of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, and their family has suffered years of repression and retaliation by Kadyrov for their activism.

Now, after his mother was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, human rights lawyer Abubakar, who has worked with the Russian NGO Crew Against Torture, spoke to openDemocracy about the years-long revenge campaign that authorities have waged against his family.

From war to persecution

My childhood is marked by memories of the Russian army’s atrocities in the wars waged by Russia to crush Chechnya’s aspirations to independence in the early post-Soviet years. I was born in Grozny in 1992 and I was seven at the onset of the Second Russo-Chechen War. To the outside world, these wars were regarded as an ‘internal Russian affair’. There was little recognition of Russia’s aggression against a people struggling for their sovereignty.

Amid the carnage, Western leaders focused on “cementing” their relationship with the then-acting president, Vladimir Putin. Russian war crimes were euphemised as mere ‘abuses’. This was not the only convenient lexicon that developed in Russia in the early 2000s: in the wake of 9/11, Putin had little difficulty co-opting the West's so-called ‘War on Terror’ to brand Chechen dissidents ‘terrorists’. The Kremlin cannot resort to the same racialised tropes in today’s war against Ukraine, so instead we read about Ukrainian ‘Nazis’ and ‘Banderovites’.

The international community’s muted response to years of human rights violations fostered a climate of impunity. It enabled Chechnya to become a laboratory for developing tactics of repression that would later be implemented across Russia and beyond its borders in Ukraine. For all the evidence of massacres by Russian forces – as well as the use of filtration camps, enforced disappearances, torture and sexual violence – you can count the number of war criminals who were eventually brought to partial account on one hand.

My own family’s persecution began in 2015, the same year the young Chechen Adam Dikaev was publicly humiliated in retribution for having criticised Kadyrov online. That year, my brother Ibragim began running a small, satirical public page on Vkontakte, a Russian social media site, mocking those in power. He was kidnapped by military men acting under Kadyrov’s orders, and taken, along with me and my father, to Kadyrov’s residence in Grozny. There, we were beaten, ordered by Kadyrov himself to clean away the blood by licking it with our tongues. We refused. My father and I were taken away by the police, tortured but released the next day: Igragim was held in Kadyrov’s basement by SOBR forces (a unit in Russia’s National Guard) for six months. He was 21 and had lost almost 30 kilos by the time of his release.

Ibragim’s mental health declined rapidly after his detention, fueling a certain recklessness in his online activities. In 2017, he was charged with allegedly ‘inciting hatred’ against Russians on a new Vkontakte page. He was released in 2019 when the law he was charged under was amended to say that a first offence should incur a fine, not a prison sentence, but by then he had spent 20 months in pretrial detention.

The Kremlin soon devised a solution that would free the authorities from having to frame such satire as ‘incitement of hatred’: a new law prohibiting all ‘disrespect of authority’. By 2022, laws criminalising all ‘discreditation of the Russian military’ took this logic to its extreme. Rather than enshrining rights, the law is used opportunistically and wielded as an instrument of repression to subdue the population, through the Kremlin’s controlled courts, falsifications of evidence in criminal cases, and use of prohibited methods of obtaining evidence.

After my brother’s second detention, I contacted the NGO Committee Against Torture [which was renamed Crew Against Torture in 2022 as a result of the foreign agent law] and journalists from Novaya Gazeta and helped my parents and sister move to Nizhny Novgorod, a city in western Russia, and my younger brothers to flee overseas.

In December 2021, 37 members of my extended family were detained in Chechnya – several of whom were held for a month. A week later, my flat in Pyatigorsk, in southwest Russia, was searched and I was threatened with being sent back to Chechnya, where I would be tortured and executed unless I agreed to cooperate with Kadyrov’s regime. I managed to trick my interrogators and escape to Georgia, and have not since returned to Russia.

Weeks after I left the country, my mother, who is 53 and diabetic, was violently detained on politically motivated charges and denied the chance to take insulin or even outdoor clothing with her. Following her arrest, Kadyrov organised astroturf demonstrations in Grozny, where photographs of my family were burned. I offered myself in exchange for my mother’s release but was met with silence. After months of ill health in detention, she was last week sentenced to five and a half years in prison; her lawyer Alexander Nemov and journalist Elena Milashina were violently attacked by assailants on their way to her trial. This is a crime against independent media and the defence of human rights in Chechnya. I have no doubt that Kadyrov is responsible, just as he was many times before.

Mine is not the only family whose relatives are used as pawns for blackmail and intimidation: in December 2021, the families of Chechen opposition bloggers Tumso Abdurakhmanov, Minkail Malizaev and Mansur Sadulaev were abducted and subjected to extreme threats of violence.

Today, this logic is murderously intensified in occupied territories of Ukraine, where Russian invaders have allegedly abducted the relatives of Ukrainian soldiers and killed the entire family of a village head accused of helping the Ukrainian military. Many such crimes being carried out in Ukraine were honed in Chechnya – with a few exceptions. The Kremlin’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children to be forcibly assimilated and fostered by Russian ‘parents’, for example, is one atrocity we in Chechnya were spared. Our children were neither white nor Christian enough to be desired as new young ‘Russians’.

As told to Lia Na’ama ten Brink and Yivha Zban’.