Translated material
There is no "East" and there is no "West"
Russia disbanded loyal Chechen units
Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, Colonel General Vladimir Moltenskoy, announced on Saturday the disbandment of the special Chechen battalions “East” and “West” , previously patronized by the GRU of the General Staff. Each of them will remain a rifle company, which, like previous battalions, will be part of the 42nd division of the Ministry of Defense, located in Chechnya on a permanent basis. Thus, the long-standing conflict between the battalions and the President of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has come to an end, meaning another victory for the latter over the federals.In Chechnya there are no longer any significant units staffed by ethnic Chechens, but not subordinate to the president of the republic. Unless, of course, you count the irreconcilable militants, whose numbers have not been discussed out loud in recent months.
The end of the battle path of “East” and “West” cannot be called unexpected. But the date of disbandment - exactly a week after the appointment of a new president in Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov - inevitably leads to the assumption that some kind of bargaining is taking place in the North Caucasus, which is not conducive to strengthening stability.
One gets the feeling that, having received the post of President of Ingushetia, the GRU was forced to curtail its very important project in Chechnya. On the other hand, Ramzan Kadyrov, having not received the go-ahead for the unification of Chechnya with Ingushetia, is clearly pleased with the dissolution of the hated battalions . It is possible that the battalions were disbanded due to a conflict between certain groups of influence in Moscow, which consider both the security forces and Ramzan Kadyrov to be instruments in their own struggle for complete federal power: Dmitry Medvedev appointed the President of Ingushetia and immediately received a positional strengthening of Ramzan Kadyrov.
General Moltenskoy said that the Ministry of Defense has debts to the servicemen of the battalions, implying purely material issues. And he said that work is underway to provide the military with housing - it is not very clear, however, whether we are talking about those who will be retained as part of the companies, or about those who were decided to be expelled. At least several hundred people will fall into this last category: “East” and “West” were not line battalions, so their numbers in the best times exceeded the required number.
Now, taking into account the personnel losses already incurred over the past year, marred by the conflict with President Kadyrov, they will face at least a four- or five-fold reduction. In order to make sure that these hundreds of dismissed men with excellent combat experience will perceive what happened as an insult and betrayal on the part of Russia, it is enough to recall the history of “East” and “West”.
These names did not appear immediately, but Kipling always “walked” somewhere nearby: “There is no east, and there is no west: what is a tribe, homeland, clan, when the strong with the strong stand face to face at the edge of the earth?” “East” and “West” arose in the late autumn of 2003 on the basis of two special companies of the Chechen commandant’s office, staffed by Chechens. The companies fought the militants better than the federals, because they knew the terrain, the enemy, and the customs of their homeland.
One of them, the one that later became the “West,” included former fighters of the anti-Dudaev opposition - Chechens who fought to preserve the unity of Chechnya with Russia even before Russia itself entered this war. “West” was commanded by the legendary Said-Magomed Kakiev, the future Hero of Russia, who tried to personally kill Dzhokhar Dudayev and fought with enemies in Grozny until the very end, when the city was taken by Maskhadov’s separatist troops in August 1996.
Kakiyev managed to escape from the encirclement. With the beginning of the second war, despite his injuries, he returned to the republic and gathered the core of his old detachment. Being a religious man, he selected to the “West” only adherents of the Naqshbandi branch of Sufism, with which the Soviet government traditionally tried to build relatively trusting relations. The tests that recruits were subjected to so that the “shaitans” would not end up in the “West” were legendary, especially against the backdrop of the easy transition of yesterday’s militants into the ranks of Kadyrov’s militia. In 2006, “West” (like “East”) accompanied Russian military engineers to Lebanon, and then participated in a peacekeeping mission in Abkhazia.
The troubles of the “West” began almost immediately after the early resignation of President Alu Alkhanov, in which the role of the latter’s religious affiliation is somewhat underestimated, just as it is underestimated in general when analyzing the situation in Chechnya. Kadyrov’s entourage saw Said Kakiyev’s Naqshbandis as a possible military support for President Alkhanov. The battalion commander himself was forced to leave Chechnya for a long time and then return to the symbolic position of deputy military commissar, and the remaining chief of staff of the battalion, Bislan Elimkhanov, constantly quarreled with Kadyrov’s security forces and already in September of this year received a dangerous bullet wound.
The “East” was formed from people from the opposite side of the front line - from the militants of the influential Gudermes commanders of the Yamadayev brothers, who fought for independence in the war of 1994-1996 and, in accordance with their merits, occupied high positions in the army of independent Ichkeria. The Ichkerian generals Yamadayevs fought against Islamic fundamentalists even under President Maskhadov. And when he was unable to resist Basayev’s invasion of Dagestan and the second Chechen war began, the Yamadayevs voluntarily surrendered Gudermes to the federales and went into Russian service. Ruslan Yamadayev became deputy military commandant of the republic. His brother Dzhabrail headed a special company, but in 2003 he died in Vedeno from the explosion of a bomb planted by militants. Dzhabrail, who posthumously received the Hero's Star, was replaced by another brother, Sulim , and Ruslan, meanwhile, became one of the leaders of the Chechen "United Russia" and was a State Duma deputy from Chechnya in 2003-2007. Both the deputy and the Vostok battalion commander later became heroes.
All the Yamadayevs were from the same teip benoi as Akhmat Kadyrov and his son, and followed the same branch of the Sufi tradition. But this did not stop Ramzan Kadyrov from seeing them as competitors and opponents. With the consent of his patrons in Moscow, who considered any checks and balances in Chechnya unnecessary and decided to focus on supporting one leader, Ramzan Kadyrov already took the party away from the Yamadayevs in 2005. Isa Yamadayev, elected from United Russia to the Chechen parliament, was forced to leave it; Ruslan Yamadayev did not enter the new State Duma in 2007. All of them together recalled the criminal record of the youngest, Badrudin Yamadayev, who in the spring of 2008, instead of serving his sentence, had the imprudence to collide with the motorcade of the President of Chechnya on one of the Gudermes streets. And he almost provoked a local war with the use of machine guns and machine guns.
At first they tried to incriminate the battalion commander, Sulim Yamadayev, for a number of episodes involving a pogrom in the village of Borozdinovskaya in the summer of 2005, with the kidnapping of two relatives of the Moscow banker Abubakar Arsamakov and a raider raid on a meat factory in St. Petersburg. But then for some reason they decided to focus on the charge of murder of a certain Usman Batsayev, which happened in 1998, when Sulim Yamadayev was not yet a Hero of Russia and a colonel in the Russian army, but was a general in the army of Ichkeria. Now Chechen law enforcement agencies call the murdered Batsayev an entrepreneur, and Mr. Yamadayev continues to believe that the murdered man was associated with the Shelkovsky fundamentalist jamaat and was liquidated as an enemy.
Since the spring of 2008, those Vostok fighters who remained loyal to the commander and did not defect from the Russian army to Kadyrov’s militia lived at their bases in a state of virtual siege. At Kadyrov’s request, the Ministry of Defense conducted an inspection of the battalion and, through the mouth of Deputy Minister General Shamanov, promised not to disband the unit. The siege continued, but this did not prevent the Yamadayevites from participating in the Russian peacekeeping mission in South Ossetia on a rotational basis.
When the war began there on August 7, Sulim Yamadayev, formally removed from command of the battalion, and two Vostok companies found themselves at the forefront of the Russian units advancing on Tskhinvali and Gori . For some strange reason, Russian generals lied to news agencies that there were no Chechen special units in South Ossetia, while Chechen special units suffered losses in the Tskhinvali suburbs. Sulim Yamadayev had the talent to hire several journalists, including those from television. As a result, the story of how the Georgians fled from the Chechens, and the Ossetians greeted them with flowers and laid tables, broke through the strange information blockade. But Colonel Yamadayev’s reward for participating in the war was not promotions and orders, but dismissal from the ranks of the armed forces.
On September 24, Ruslan Yamadayev was killed in Moscow , who, together with the former commandant of Chechnya, General Sergei Kizyun, was traveling either to consultations with the presidential administration, or from these consultations. Someone spread a rumor that Sulim Yamadayev declared blood feud against Ramzan Kadyrov at his brother’s funeral. Sulim had to refute this information: he did not go to the funeral and did not bring charges against Kadyrov. But Kadyrov did not drop his charges against Yamadayev: on Friday, the investigative committee at the Chechen prosecutor’s office ordered the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs to ensure the “forced arrest” of a Russian army colonel in connection with the charge of murder of Mr. Batsayev.
A similar order was given in the fall of 2006 in relation to the commander of the Gorets operational combat group, Movladi Baysarov. “Highlander” did not want to move from federal to Kadyrov’s subordination. As a result, Movladi Baysarov, who asked for protection in Moscow to no apparent avail, was shot on Leninsky Prospekt “during arrest.”