At the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to take over government offices in Kyiv and assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing Ukrainian intelligence and security officials..

Three weeks before the day of the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, Putin summoned him to Moscow to strategize, according to Ukrainian intelligence officials.. He instructed a Chechen to take Kyiv and kill the Ukrainian president.

In the following days, Kadyrov looked confident. "

The assassination of the president, an honorable and desirable task, was “a kind of bonus for Kadyrov,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine..

Kadyrov's troops entered Ukraine on February 25, the day after the invasion, in three columns of heavily armed armored personnel carriers.. In a video intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence and viewed by the Journal, a senior official loyal to Kadyrov reported to his superior that the operation had begun..

" We are starting to move," “More than 1500 people, the best special forces, the best fighters”.

For several days, Kadyrov broadcast footage of the attacks on his personal Telegram channel, where he has over three million subscribers, wearing camouflage and night vision goggles, wielding heavy machine guns and sniper rifles..

But, like other Russian units along the front line, the Chechens met stiff resistance.. The first of their three groups was almost completely destroyed on the outskirts of Kyiv. The other two groups stopped their advance to regroup before reaching the capital..

The failed attempt proved to be a harbinger of much bigger problems for Putin and Kadyrov. Zelensky not only survived, but thrived.

When the military operation failed, Kadyrov turned to his people for a shadow mobilization. According to a 35-year-old former Chechen resident who fled in August, several of his neighbors and friends signed up for the war as authorities offered up to 300,000 rubles, or about $4,600, a month..

When Putin needed more soldiers on a rapidly collapsing front line, Chechen residents say, Kadyrov rounded up thousands of men, sometimes by force, and sent them to Ukraine..

Now, after the retreat of the Russian troops, Kadyrov's men restore order at the front and seek out alleged spies in the occupied Ukrainian territories, sometimes resorting to torture..

According to documents and interviews with Ukrainian officials and people close to the Kremlin, Putin has used Russia's massive budget for decades to support Kadyrov.. Now the 46-year-old Chechen warlord is straining to meet the Russian leader's crucial demands.

This relationship - one of the most important in Russia - demonstrates the risks and rewards of helping to maintain the Putin system..

One of the most dedicated figures in the president's war effort has always been Kadyrov, who has publicly described himself as Putin's infantryman..

For almost 20 years, Moscow has been sending billions of dollars to Kadyrov, which he has used to run his home region as a personal fiefdom with his own highly trained private army..

Continued state funding bolsters Kadyrov's grip on a predominantly Muslim region where residents and analysts say he is hated by many.

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According to a former Kremlin official and another person close to the Kremlin, he does not often communicate with Putin, but the Russian president addresses Kadyrov personally, and not through aides, as with other Russian governors.

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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denies that the Russian leader ordered a Chechen warlord to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling the claim " Kadyrov did not respond to requests for comment..

The Russian president "

Peskov said Vladimir Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov regularly talk about hostilities, noting that two Chechen battalions are on the front lines..

Political analysts believe that Kadyrov is trying to get rid of the competitors with whom he is now competing for the Kremlin's money. He became a leading critic of the Russian Ministry of Defense, publicly blaming at least one general for battlefield failures that could have cost the average Russian citizen years in prison..

Before Putin came to power, Kadyrov and the Kremlin were on opposite sides. The Chechen and his father Akhmat fought alongside separatist rebels against the Russians during the first Chechen war in the 1990s before defecting to Moscow and taking power in 2000.

After Kadyrov's father was killed in a bomb blast in 2004, Putin summoned the 27-year-old Kadyrov in a tracksuit to the Kremlin to express his support for him..

A few years later, when Mr. Kadyrov turned 30, he took his father's place as head of Chechnya..

The US imposed sanctions on Kadyrov in 2017 and 2020 for alleged human rights abuses by his forces at home, where he cracks down on remaining separatists and those who oppose him.

The US has said its troops were involved in the 2015 assassination of prominent Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was gunned down just steps away from the Kremlin.. In September, the United States again imposed sanctions on Kadyrov for facilitating Mr. Putin's invasion of Ukraine..

The US Treasury Department, announcing the latest round of sanctions, said "

The Chechen leader zealously promotes Putin's illiberal values \u200b\u200bin the region, detains and tortures local gays and transgenders, according to local residents and human rights activists, and threatens Russia's urban elite who are protesting the war..

With the blessing of the Kremlin, he has created his own army - informally known as "

The Kadyrovites fought for the Kremlin in the five-day war in Georgia in 2008, were sent to Ukraine in 2014 to help Putin take Crimea, and two years later went to Syria to hold villages captured by the Syrian government.

Russia's security elite criticize Kadyrov for playing by his own rules but realize they are powerless to challenge him, say analysts including Mark Galleotti, chief executive of Mayak Intelligence, a London-based consultancy who has written extensively about Chechnya and its leader.

Throughout the conflict, Kadyrov’s soldiers were sent to Russian-occupied cities, including Bucha near Kyiv and the Donbas cities of Mariupol and Severodonetsk.. There they hunted for Ukrainian spies or partisans, interrogating and torturing residents and ransacking houses..

Ukrainians sometimes use the verb "

" “They do the dirtiest work, torture.”.

In a macabre video widely posted on social media this summer, one of Mr Kadyrov's troops in Severodonetsk was filmed castrating a Ukrainian prisoner before being shot dead..

In September, the wives of pro-Moscow fighters from Russian-held areas of Donbas filed a formal complaint against Kadyrov's men to the head of Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine, known as the Donetsk People's Republic.. The letter, confirmed by Ukrainian officials, denounced Chechen violence against fighters, including allegations of rape..

When disagreement with Russia's way of waging war and mobilization recently spilled onto the streets of Moscow, Kadyrov positioned himself to be useful to Putin there as well..

In a video released on his behalf in October, one of the Chechen leader's top allies warned Russian students against protesting the Kremlin or the mobilization, saying: "