Nanna Heitmann spent time observing Russian troops training in Chechnya, then later traveled to Bakhmut, Ukraine. Neil MacFarquhar reported from New York.
A hulking military transport plane roared onto the tarmac at the main airfield in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic in southeastern Russia, and a group of 120 volunteer fighters heading for Ukraine clambered aboard.
Dressed in camouflage, the newly minted troops had just completed at least 10 days of training in Gudermes, near Grozny, at the Special Forces University, which accepts men from across Russia for general military instruction.
Some of the trainees lacked any combat experience. Others were veterans returning to Ukraine for their second or third tour — including former mercenaries from the Wagner militia, disbanded in 2023 after a short-lived mutiny against the Kremlin.
Some Wagner fighters, chafing at the idea of working for the Russian Defense Ministry, instead transferred whole units to the Chechen-trained forces, known as Akhmat battalions, intended in part to absorb fighters from outside the Russian Army. Wagner veterans were often first recruited from prison, including a lean man with a gold front tooth, identified only by his military call sign, “Jedi,” because of the potential for retribution.
“Go for your Fatherland? What kind of Fatherland? It kept me in prison all my life,” said Jedi, 39, a construction laborer who was convicted of robbery and fraud. In and out of jail since 14, he had six months left on a six-year sentence when he signed up.
“The volunteers go for the money,” he said. “I have yet to meet anyone here for the ideology.” He also wanted a clean slate, he said.
Fat signing bonuses plus payments of about $2,000 per month, at least double the average wage in Russia, has spurred recruitment.
The training near Grozny highlights the evolution of ethnic loyalties that is manifest in this war. Some of those now training there were last in Chechnya as young conscripts for the Russian Army, fighting against Chechens who were part of the separatist movement.
The participation of some Chechens represents another inversion of history: After hundreds of years of enmity with Russia, Chechens were deploying to Ukraine to fight Moscow’s war.
The separatist movement of the 1990s culminated in two brutal wars against Moscow that lasted intermittently for over a decade. The city of Grozny was flattened, and tens of thousands of Chechens died.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the authoritarian leader of Chechnya, has taken an aggressive stance toward Ukraine since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Chechen forces have claimed an instrumental role in some key battles, including the siege of Mariupol early in the war.
But Mr. Kadyrov has faced accusations that he has refrained from sending his fighters full-bore into the fight, with Chechens dying in fewer numbers than soldiers from other minority areas. Sparing his fighters keeps intact his private militia, the core of the security forces that ensure his rule in Chechnya.
Instead, Mr. Kadyrov has tried to underscore his loyalty to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by pouring resources into this military training center. The regimen consists of live fire exercises with artillery, some mining and demining instruction and first aid.
The various Akhmat battalions were named, like so much in Chechnya, after Mr. Kadyrov’s father, Akhmat Kadyrov, who switched sides to join Moscow in the separatist struggle and was then assassinated in 2004.
Russia has recruited troops for its war effort wherever it could find them, seeking to minimize the need for a draft. In 2022, it lifted an almost blanket ban on Chechens serving in the Russian military, fallout from the separatist movement.
Of the group being dispatched to Ukraine last fall from the tarmac in Grozny, many were in their 30s and 40s, and fewer than 10 were Chechens. Despite Jedi’s claims, money is not the sole motivation.
Some fled troubled domestic lives. Others wanted to escape daily drudgery. Some, of course, profess to be fighting out of patriotism. Many of the men agreed to talk on the condition that they be identified by only their first names or military call signs for fear of retribution.
Anatoly, 24, was among 10 men who volunteered together from a small farming village high in the mountains in the picturesque, south-central Altai region. “My father forced me to shovel snow, to work, to clear out the dung from the cows,” he said. “I ran away from this work to do something else. Every year is the same.” He admitted that the money was an incentive, too.
Another rural worker, a 45-year-old shepherd who uses the call sign “Masyanya,” traveled about 4,500 kilometers from the Republic of Khakassia for the training. “I’m going to defend my motherland, so the war doesn’t come here,” he said.
The contract with the Akhmat battalion lasts only four months, a big incentive when compared with the open-ended deployments for regular soldiers.
Last fall, Mr. Kadyrov formed a new unit, the Sheikh Mansour battalion, named after an 18th-century imam who fought against the Russian Empire. The soldiers are all Chechens or from the small, neighboring republics in the mountainous Caucasus region, and are mostly in their 20s. Chechens fighting for Ukraine against Russia named their battalion after Sheikh Mansour first, and now Mr. Kadyrov is trying to reclaim the name.
Turpal, 20, was working as a security guard for a large supermarket chain in Moscow when he got permission from his father to sign up for the new unit, saying that he wanted to fight against “those devils who are in Ukraine who want to bring their perverted ideas here.”
As he left to go back to the training center after a weekend visiting his parents, he hugged his mother and shook hands with his father. “Russia has been fighting for all its existence,” said Mayrali, Turpal’s father. “You can’t beat it. It is better for Chechnya to be with Russia than to be against Russia.”
Wagner veterans serve in the Sheikh Mansour battalion, too. A 35-year-old fighter who uses the call sign “Dikiy,” or “Wild,” said that he had served 18 months of a nearly 10-year sentence for murder when he signed up. He fought in Ukraine for 11 months, was wounded three times and still gets fierce headaches.
Back in Chechnya, he found the idea of working for $200 per month demoralizing, so he returned to the war. “I don’t know how to do anything else,” he said.
The Akhmat troops are better equipped than the regular army; unlike some regular Russian soldiers, they do not have to buy their own basic equipment.
Jedi said that when he first deployed with Wagner in Ukraine, some young men in the Russian Army came running up begging for supplies, for fuel and for bread. “In Akhmat, I don’t even wash my socks. I wear them, throw them away, wear them,” he said. “The same applies to underwear and bed linen. We have everything.”
Moscow subsidizes an estimated 80 percent of Chechnya’s budget, though it is unclear how much goes to military training.
At the airfield, before the battalion departed, a senior officer lined up the new soldiers to wish them good luck. “Are the fighters ready?” he shouted. “Yes sir,” they bark in unison, followed by the Muslim expression “Allahu akbar!” or “God is great!” plus the Chechen war cry, “Akhmat Sila!” or “Akhmat rules!”
Once they arrived in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, some of the men were assigned to maintain Russian control over Bakhmut, now an abandoned husk of a city after months of fierce fighting.
The streets are deserted, especially during the day, when Ukrainian drones roam overhead, hunting for targets. On foggy days, fighters can sometimes be glimpsed walking through the rubble.
Traffic rumbles to life at night, when the wounded from battles scattered around the Bakhmut region are evacuated. The roads are littered with burned cars and ambulances.
While the war grinds relentlessly above ground, the roar of artillery and exploding shells does not penetrate far beneath the surface, where the Akhmat forces have taken over a field hospital first set up by Wagner.
The Bakhmut region was once famous for its sparkling wine, and the hospital operates in the maze of underground tunnels where tens of thousands of bottles remain stored along the walls. (The prohibition on drinking it by both Wagner and Akhmat has been largely respected.) Once a tourist attraction, the old décor is still intact; dusty plaster statues of ancient gods loom over the wounded.
The caves are wide enough to accommodate at least two vans abreast, and several times a day, vehicles ferrying the wounded and the dead navigate the darkened, fog-shrouded labyrinth. Soldiers leap from the vehicles and quickly carry their often groaning comrades on stretchers to the makeshift stabilization point.
One of the surgeons, Bulya, 34, has worked for Wagner, mostly in Africa, since 2017. On trips to Moscow, he said, people there reacted to seeing him in his fatigues like “dirt under your fingernails,” but in Chechnya, he found more respect.
As losses pile up, Bulya said that he was eager for the Russian Army to make it to Kyiv. “I don’t need their negotiations,” he said using an expletive. “I hope that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin will do that, that we will go to the end. We will get there.”
Anastasia Trofimova contributed reporting from Grozny and Bakhmut.