Russia’s Chechen leader says 3,000 Wagner mercenaries to join Akhmat special forces

The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has announced that 3 thousand former fighters from the private military company (PMC) Wagner Group will join the Akhmat special forces together.

According to him, the Russian Ministry of Defense has allocated the required number of vacancies within the unit, Kommersant reports.

Kadyrov published a video in which the information was confirmed by the Akhmat commander Apty Alaudinov and Alexander Kuznetsov, whose alias is “Ratibor”.

"A decision was made for a Wagner commander with the call sign Ratibor to join the legendary Akhmat special forces commando unit. As many as 3,000 ex-Wagner fighters will join the special forces group with him," Kadyrov wrote on his Telegram channel. The Russian Defense Ministry has already opened the necessary number of vacancies to recruit soldiers, he added.

According to the Chechen leader, the fighters will soon start accomplishing combat tasks. He described the corresponding decision as a strategically important step toward strengthening the country’s defence capabilities and enhancing the group’s efficiency.

Alaudinov said in the video that the leadership of the Ministry of Defense approved the formation of a new regiment whose commander will be “Ratibor”, and added that “we will form the regiment from the personnel who previously served directly under his command”.

He noted that separate battalions formed from former fighters of the Wagner PMC are already operating as part of Akhmat.

In recent years, Wagner Group has become one of Russia's most strong private military forces. The group emerged during Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and later expanded its operations into Africa (Central African Republic, Sudan, Mali and Burkina Faso) and the Middle East (Syria, Libya). Its activities in African states take place under the guise of sending “military instructors” to train the country’s armed forces.

Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the passenger list of a jet which crashed in Russia killing all 10 people on board in August 2023, two months after he led an aborted mutiny against Russia's armed forces.

The Chechen special forces unit Akhmat, also known as the Kadyrovites or Kadyrovtsy, is believed to be a unit within the Russian National Guard (Rosgvardiya), as a paramilitary force also deployed in Ukraine. It receives all the main resources from the Russian Defence Ministry.

Akhmat consisted of three units: "Akhmat-Rosgvardiya", the police force "Akhmat-MVD" and the "volunteer" force "Akhmat-Defence Ministry". 

In late June 2022, Ramzan Kadyrov announced the creation of four new battalions - "North-Akhmat", "South-Akhmat", "West-Akhmat," and "East-Akhmat" - consisting only of ethnic Chechens, that would be sent to fight in Ukraine. On 26 February 2022, addressing about 12,000 Chechen soldiers gathered in the main square of the Chechen capital, preparing to go to war in Ukraine, Kadyrov announced that Chechen military forces had been deployed to Ukraine.