Daily Journal:

This is a common situation for emigration after the civil war. Imagine the twenties: Soviet Russia is getting on its feet, everything around seems to be nicer and more beautiful, especially when there is no reliable information, nostalgia somewhere in Paris, where a former white officer works as a taxi driver, eats terribly, and thoughts of returning to their homeland are nowhere don't go away. The milestones change logically. Khambiev’s mission is not anything outstanding; it fits well into the context of events. A few months ago, Timur Mutsuraev, a Chechen resistance singer whose songs like “Freedom or Death!” rushed from all the radios, wrote an article in which he stated that he was returning to Chechnya, and explained his motives approximately in the spirit of Smenovekhov’s ideology: that now a great country, independent of the federal center, is being built by the current Chechen authorities. This article was discussed in exile. I don’t know the mood of individual representatives of the Chechen emigration, but it’s a fact: on August 7, it will be ten months since the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria does not exist, since Doku Umarov declared that he was engaged in the Caucasian Emirate, and was abandoning the separatist project. In some ways, this was a return to reality, because the powerful and magnificent bureaucratic structures of Ichkeria remained mainly in exile, and the resistance or underground became all-Caucasian, not only and not so much Chechen. Numerous figures who had previously been representatives of Ichkeria in exile and even held ministerial posts tried to elect a new president, “the successor of the successor of the successor” Maskhadov, by parliamentary voting by telephone: 21 parliamentarians voted, it was reported that the remaining 20 were killed or became nationalists during this time -traitors. They elected Akhmed Zakayev as Prime Minister, transforming, without noticing it, Ichkeria from a presidential republic into a parliamentary one. So Ichkeria exists exclusively in virtual reality, perhaps reminiscent of the active life of Russian emigrants in the 1920s-1930s. Under these conditions, nostalgic sentiments are quite obvious. Therefore, perhaps Khambiev’s mission is not hopeless. It does not go beyond the practice, which has been going on for several years.

The current Kadyrov government largely consists of former militants who switched over to the federal side at various times, including during the second war and after Nord-Ost. These are people removed from the forest in 2003, 2005, 2006. Among them was, for example, Mairbek Eshiev, who became the head of the anti-terrorist center of the Vvedensky district, and at the same time managed to kill a policeman and find himself on the federal wanted list, while simultaneously receiving some awards. He finally disappeared only after it became clear that he was an exiled Cossack who had been carrying out Basayev’s assignments all this time and was plotting against Kadyrov. The former head of Maskhadov's Ministry of Sharia State Security now sits in the Chechen parliament, on the commission for control of security forces. If such people have received and are receiving favor, positions and weapons, then why are those who have been in exile for a long time worse? The same brother of Magomed Khambiev did not fight at all; in February 2004, he was a doctor at a hospital thrown into the dungeons, where without anesthesia, without antiseptics, without instruments, without lighting, they had to perform mass amputations. There is obviously no blood on it. I know quite noble people in the ranks of the Chechen emigration, those to whom Russian captured soldiers owe their lives. In any case, one should be surprised at the complete amnesty that took place in Chechnya in past years, not formalized by procedures, and not at what is happening now.