Former employee of the Soviet Union's Committee for State Security (KGB), Sergey Zhirnov, revealed in an interview with Unian what is happening with the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov.
Many times we have "buried" Prigozhin, but still managed to reach the heavens. Whether he is alive or not, he has been written off for good. Now, everyone is collectively "burying" Kadyrov. According to information from Ukrainian intelligence, Andrey Yusov, a representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, stated that Kadyrov's condition has significantly deteriorated. Russian social media pages have been tracking the routes where Kadyrov is being transported for the past two days.
"The Kadyrov case is the easiest one among all. Speculations or reasonable guesses are more common when it comes to Putin and his doubles, or his oncology. With Kadyrov, it's much simpler; there's no need for speculation – just watch his videos on TikTok. You don't need to be blind or deaf to understand that something abnormal is happening to him: in 6 months, he doubled in size, his face swelled. It's clear to the naked eye that his facial color is abnormal, he has abnormal obesity, incoherent speech, and he struggles to articulate words. Anyone can see that Kadyrov is ill. At first, it was said that he was just drinking heavily and couldn't articulate. But from time to time, Kadyrov disappears from the Chechen Republic, going somewhere in the Middle East (either Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or the UAE), where he receives treatment for drug addiction. You could call it speculation, but his plane flies there, which makes it almost an established fact. Kadyrov has a doctor from Jordan.
Later, we learned about the disappearance of Suleymanov, who was the Minister of Health of Chechnya – an absolutely horrifying story that he was allegedly one of Kadyrov's treating physicians and that no one had seen him since October of last year. The man disappeared, and rumors began that he had been subjected to severe abuse and torture, and then buried almost alive. Chechnya is a small republic. If something is happening in the Russian Federation, say in Kamchatka, it might reach us with great difficulty because, despite the internet, it's still very far away. But Chechnya is very close. Everyone is on TikTok and Instagram, so if something happens, it spreads very, very quickly. Everyone confides in their closest relative, who has 250 relatives around them, and within three seconds, the whole of Chechnya knows the secret. In the Caucasus, there are no secrets at all.
So when they say that Kadyrov has health problems, that he has a drug addiction and is being taken for compulsory treatment, that he walked out almost naked somewhere in Grozny in a drug-induced state at night, and that he was taken by the FSB, put on some federal plane, and taken to Moscow – I tend to trust these rumors. Because it's just visible to the naked eye.
I think that at this specific moment, it's not in Putin's interest. It might be in his interest to scare Kadyrov, though. So, if it's the FSB behind this poisoning, it's the kind that doesn't kill a person. Like with Politkovskaya, who was on a flight to Beslan, drank some tea on the plane, and couldn't make it to her destination. Roughly speaking, they just incapacitated her, but didn't kill her. And, in my opinion, in the case of Kadyrov – if the FSB is involved – it would be a similar technique: to create problems for him so that he deals with his own issues, and he won't have time for a state coup. Although, frankly, I never considered this version to be serious. Kadyrov is all-powerful in Chechnya, but he can't do anything beyond its borders. He has his TikTok troops who can handle unarmed students and grandmothers or abduct women, but they can't stage a coup in the Kremlin. Putin is protected by the Federal Protective Service, and the presidential security service of the St. Petersburg State Security Service – that's five thousand people, and Kadyrov's people are not close to them.
Putin is not particularly interested in Kadyrov's disappearance because he fulfills a contract: you keep Chechnya under control but can do whatever you want there. But Putin needs Kadyrov to be more subdued because he became emboldened, looking at what happened to Prigozhin. He had the audacity to think that he, too, with his bandits, could come to Moscow and stage a similar rebellion. To prevent this, they might have given him a slight poisoning, causing him to swell up, develop kidney problems, and require dialysis every week. However, on the other hand, I don't rule out the possibility that Kadyrov might have gotten into drugs on his own."
