Doesn't want to believe

The former commander of the Vostok battalion, Sulim Yamadayev, said in an interview with Kommersant that he does not believe in the involvement of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov in the murder of his brother Ruslan. In addition, he denied reports that he allegedly promised to take revenge on Kadyrov.

According to Yamadayev, Kadyrov could not kill Ruslan, since they are from the same teip, and Sulim himself was the named son of the father of the current Chechen president, Akhmat Kadyrov, who was killed on May 9, 2004. Sulim Yamadayev believes that his brother’s killers knew about his conflict with Ramzan Kadyrov and wanted to “push them together.” He called the message about his promise to take revenge “a lie deliberately planted by someone.” Sulim said that a wedge was constantly being driven between him and Kadyrov, and the collision of the Vostok convoy with the presidential guard on the highway in April of this year was only a pretext for the conflict. Let us recall that in August Sulim Yamadayev was put on the federal wanted list on charges of kidnapping and killing civilians, and then dismissed from the armed forces (however, immediately before that he and the battalion took part in an operation in Georgia). Yamadayev himself told Kommersant that he can only be charged with the possible murder of one of the suicide bombers, whom Shamil Basayev “sent” to “liquidate” Yamadayev. Sulim confirmed that criminal cases are being opened against Vostok fighters all the time, they are taken away from their homes somewhere at night, and those who previously fought on the side of the Wahhabis, “only now they have shoulder straps.”

Sulim Yamadayev did not go to his brother’s funeral in Gudermes because, according to him, people he trusted called him and said that he would be killed as soon as he appeared in Chechnya, and his brother could have been killed precisely so that he arrived in Chechnya.

Yamadayev emphasized that his family has no blood relations, thereby refuting Ramzan Kadyrov’s assumption that Ruslan Yamadayev could have been killed out of blood feud. According to him, the Yamadayevs had nothing to do with oil or the gambling business in Moscow. He admitted that he owned the car in which his older brother was killed, but ruled out that the killers could have confused them - Ruslan had already been driving it for six months, and they began to follow him a few weeks before the murder.