In the Caucasus, Chechen women were the first to come to the rally. Calls to go to the square appeared in messengers the day before. The fact is that forced mobilization took place in Chechnya long before the official announcement of the presidential decree. On September 20, an anonymous user of the WhatsApp messenger appealed to Chechen women to gather for a rally in the center of Grozny on September 21 at 10 o’clock. The woman said that all her sons were sent to fight, two of them have already been killed.
“Today has come the day when we all must show our unity and prove in practice that a Chechen woman can save her child. I am the same mother as you, and I am turning to you regardless of whether your son goes to war or not. If things go on like this, then your children will go too, since it makes no difference to them whether he is a military man or not,” the appeal said.
About 40 women gathered in the square near the central mosque. According to the 1ADAT Telegram channel, all of them were taken to the Grozny City Hall. As the Memorial Center for Human Rights later reported, men, relatives of the participants in the action, were also brought there and forced to beat the women, threatening that otherwise the security forces themselves would do it.
Later, the head of the republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, said that 20 women came to the rally - three of them have children fighting in Ukraine, and the rest went to the anti-war rally for “pennies from European organizations.”
Kadyrov called the rally participants “enemies of the people” and said that if the men in the families of the protesters cannot look after their women, they should be sent to war so that they can at least earn money. Chechen activist Ibragim Yangulbaev (Rosfinmonitoring included him in the register of terrorists and extremists) later reported that relatives of the women detained at the rally were forced to go to war as “volunteers.”
According to Memorial, among the men brought to the mayor's office was a native of the village of Stary Achkhoy, Adam Muradov, who lived with his family in the village of Katayama, Staropromyslovsky district of Grozny. His son, 18-year-old Valid Muradov, was immediately taken to Gudermes, to the Special Forces University, where so-called “volunteers” undergo military training. And already on September 25, Walid told his family by phone that he was boarding a plane departing for Ukraine.
As the Memorial Center for Human Rights reports, on October 3, his father Adam Muradov, who was deeply affected by the humiliation to which his family was subjected in the Grozny mayor’s office and worried about Walid’s life, died during prayer from a heart attack. His death caused a wide resonance in the republic.
According to experts, a protest rally in such a “dictatorial republic” as Chechnya, where any dissent is brutally punished, should become an alarming signal for the authorities. By the way, Kadyrov soon announced that partial mobilization would not be carried out in Chechnya, because the mobilization plan here had already been completed by 254 percent.