The mob’s humanitarian backdoor: Ramzan Kadyrov’s mafia connections reach deep into German critical infrastructure
This is a joint investigation with Der Spiegel.
On Oct. 30, the Munich Higher Regional Court handed down a verdict against three defendants in a case involving espionage on behalf of Russia and the preparation of acts of sabotage, sentencing the main defendant to six years in prison. All three held dual Russian and German citizenship. According to investigators, from October 2023 to April 2024 the spies gathered information on the movement of military equipment, a refinery in Bavaria, and the deployment of U.S. troops near Grafenwöhr in Upper Palatinate.
This case is far from an isolated incident: in recent years, Russia has mounted large-scale espionage operations on German territory, actively recruiting people with dual citizenship. Typical tasks assigned by Russian intelligence officers to people on the ground include photographing infrastructure and energy facilities and tracking the movement of trains.
Such operations are conducted all across Germany, but especially intensively at transportation and shipping hubs — chief among them Hamburg, home to Germany’s largest seaport. The port is integrated with a rail network extending more than 300 km internally, allowing cargo to be rapidly transshipped and dispatched to all parts of Europe.
Police and intelligence services have long noted Russia’s strong interest in Hamburg. However, as The Insider has found, Russia does not even need to send spies in order to monitor rail traffic from the Port of Hamburg. Companies owned by figures close to Chechnya head Ramzan Kadyrov operate entirely openly in the city, providing security for logistics facilities. Despite previously having been granted asylum in Europe, these Kadyrov loyalists continue to make regular trips to Russia.
Kadyrov’s envoys in Germany
Officially, no position called a “representative of Ramzan Kadyrov in Europe” exists. Nevertheless, the Chechen authorities actively use this title, and de facto, such representation does indeed operate on German territory, if not all across Europe. In 2020, when a conflict erupted in Germany between the Chechen mafia and the Arab Remmo crime clan, a demonstrative reconciliation meeting featured world boxing champion Manuel Charr on the Arab side and European mixed martial arts champion Timur Dugazaev on the Chechen side — Dugazaev was there as the “official representative of the head of the Chechen Republic.”