Performative brutality and collective punishment

I have not, to be honest, had much time to think about much of anything this week: All of my time has been consumed by an urgent client project. As a result, this week’s newsletter is coming to you a little late, and quite possibly a little undercooked. Nevertheless, the story of the week kind of picks itself: An attack on the police in Chechnya and the authorities’ reaction to it.

So, with due apologies for haste, here’s what you’ll find this week:

• An explanation of what happened
• An outline of how the Chechen regime responded
• A brief reflection on what it tells us

Teenager attacks police before being killed

The first reports of something happening emerged on 7 April, when Chechen opposition sources on Telegram began reporting that an unknown person had attacked a traffic police post in Achkhoy-Martan, wounding at least one before being shot dead by the police.

Gradually, more information emerged: the attacker was identified as a 16-year-old (17 by some other accounts) by the name of Khumashev, and he was only armed with a knife. Two policemen were wounded in the attack, one of whom was killed.

The Chechen branch of the Investigative Committee later confirmed the attack and the number of people killed, but made no reference to how many other police officers were wounded in the incident.

The incident was the first in Chechnya in 2025. The last insurgent attack in the republic took place in October 2024, when an unknown person fired on a Rosgvardia vehicle in Petropavlovskaya, Groznenskiy Rayon, killing one member of the security services and wounding another. This was followed by security service raids across the republic, including in Argun.

Chechen regime blames Ukraine, targets relatives

The response of the Chechen authorities to the latest incident was typically brutal.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov claimed that the attack was orchestrated by people living outside Chechnya, including people living in Turkey. However, the main person in charge was, per Kadyrov, a citizen of Ukraine.

As punishment, Kadyrov instructed the authorities to expel the fathers and brothers of those behind the attack, as well as of the attacker himself, from the republic, and to confiscate their property. If the orchestrators “do not stop working for Ukraine, which finances them, then we need to expel other relatives”. Kadyrov was speaking in Chechen to a meeting of the local security services.

The authorities did not stop there. State employees, students and school children were forced to attend a public meeting, held in the square outside the building that houses the local administration in Achkhoy-Martan. Attendees were treated to the public display of the body of the attacker and a lecture on how the relatives would be expelled and not informed of where the body was buried, as and when it was eventually removed (videos show it remaining there after the meeting).

Pointless violence and signs of weakness

It seems a bit superfluous to point out how offensive the degradation of the dead is within Chechen culture. There are, after all, not any cultures that I’m aware of where parading the dead in front of school children is deemed acceptable. If you do know of any, this is one topic on which I’m happy to remain ignorant.

Many of the features of what happened are instead depressingly familiar. The Chechen authorities have long practiced collective punishment against those who oppose it — whether violently or peacefully. It is a grimly effective method of control: It becomes harder to justify resistance when it is others who will bear the costs, and concepts of bravery and courage, where they might apply, become much more ambiguous. That collective punishment is firmly prohibited under international humanitarian law is irrelevant. It is permitted under Russian law, even if the Chechen authorities have little time for such procedural niceties. And, in any case, the tireless ghoul that is Dmitriy Peskov has already issued his entirely predictable statement that the reports of the meeting in Achkhoy-Martan are unreliable and he has no other information. Nothing to see here, kindly move along — we only investigate abuses when we have an incentive to do so.

There are, however, two noteworthy aspects of these developments. The first concerns the incident itself. It was not an atypical event: Low sophistication attacks that produce a few casualties in the security services but also lead to the death of all the attackers have been a recurrent feature of the post-insurgency landscape (by which I mean the end of organised, structured armed insurgency in 2017). They do not represent a significant threat to the regime, precisely because they are small in scale and there is no continuity beyond the individual event. Yet it is precisely this that makes them unpopular, even among some of those who fully embrace armed struggle against the Chechen regime. I’m reminded of the criticisms of such attacks by people such as Murad Margoshvili (Muslim al-Shishani), who lambasted those who encouraged them (principally the Islamic State) precisely because they represented a pointless loss of life, divorced from any broader purpose. In other words, this type of attack is the least likely to be the harbinger of a return to a broader, more structured form of armed struggle, because even proponents of violence do not universally see it as such.

The second aspect may at first glance appear contradictory. It relates to the extreme reaction of the Chechen authorities. While this may only be a repetition of behaviours that we have seen before, it demonstrates how sensitive — and thus worried — the authorities are about absolutely any manifestation of resistance. All it takes is one juvenile, armed with nothing more than a knife, for them to reveal their brutality in all its force. It makes me think of Hannah Arendt’s point that violence is not a sign of power, but a sign of its absence. This is not, in other words, the reaction of a regime that is confident of its control. So while it might be precisely the type of incident that is not going to herald the end of the regime, it is the type of reaction that illustrates deep concerns that something might. And it is often the consequences of the reaction to an event rather than the event itself that have the greater impact.

It’s entirely possible I have further, more carefully considered thoughts on these events. But I’m tired and hungry, and there’s only so much energy one can expend on the dire state of the world…