Russian imperialism started not with Ukraine, it started with the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria soon after the Soviet Union collapse. And de-occupation of the Chechen homeland could be the second stage (after the de-occupation of the Ukrainian territories) of the end of the modern Russian empire.
18 of October 2022 Ukrainian Parliament - Verkhovna Rada - recognized the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria as “temporarily occupied territory», and also Ukraine recognized Russian actions in Chechnya as genocide of the Chechen people. This could change everything.
While Russian proxy Ramzan Kadyrov tried to show the world that Chechens are submissive to Russian rule, using blackmail and torture to make Chechen men fight on the Russian side, the Chechen population is not so easily tricked.
Since 2014 Chechen volunteers have been fighting on the Ukrainian side and Chechen bloggers and politicians see the Russian-Ukrainian conflict as a joint fight against Russian imperialism. Now Ukraine is showing that it sees Chechens as equal partners as well. If that support had been shown in the 90th, if the world supported Chechnya like it is now supporting Ukraine, maybe modern Russian imperialism would never have been born and there would be no war in Ukraine at all.
But the Chechen population, including more than 43 000 kids from just one million Chechen nations, was sacrificed because the world thought it could try to reason with Russia nicely.
When the young former KGB officer Vladimir Putin came to power, he gained his popularity partly because of his outraged anti-Chechen sentiments. And he saw the world’s tolerance as a weakness.
Now, just like before, the question of recognizing Chechen rights for self-determination is not just a purely political strategic issue. Still, it’s also a human rights and social justice question.
And it’s not just about the fate of a tiny nation that desperately longed for its independence. It is also about the safety of all neighbors of Russia and the right of self-determination of many small nations living under Russian rule in poverty and under the cultural oppression of the Kremlin.
The modern Russian Federation is one of the last colonial empires, so it has to use brutal force to stay an empire. The Russian government also has to establish a propaganda machine to keep a xenophobic, Russian-suprematist culture alive and to break Russian kids so they would follow the government’s orders and fight wars without question. This mentality puts Ukraine, Estonia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Finland, and all other Russian neighbors at risk, but it also harms ordinary Russians. The long question short: with imperialistic culture and political climate, Russia couldn’t have a free democratic society. And the freedom of Chechnya and other de-facto colonies could free future Russian generations as well, and it could be beneficial for everyone.
So in this short report, we will look briefly at four main reasons why Western governments need to recognize the independence of the Chechen republic of Ichkeria and also pay attention to the border misunderstanding about Chechen freedom fighters that existed in Western media, political circles, and beyond.
