War With Chechnya Brutalized Russian Society, and Ukraine Is Paying the Price

During Russia’s wars on Chechnya, videos of beheadings of Russian soldiers shocked and dismayed Russian society. But only for a while. Today, that kind of brutality has become entertainment for mainstream Russian society—as long as Russians are doing it.

In a way, I wish I were shocked by the horrific video that came out last week of a screaming Ukrainian prisoner of war being brutally beheaded by Russian soldiers.

At the same time, how can I be? Russians have done the same in Syria. The brutality of Russia’s war in Ukraine is deliberate—and Russian society is caught in a paradoxical spiral of denial and applause for it.

The so-called Chechenization (a term frequently used by Russian dissidents and academics, originally to refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy of leaning on local warlords) of Russian society has been a long time coming. I use that term with caution; there’s nothing inherently brutal about Chechen society itself, as horrendous as the wars there were. Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov, propped up by Putin, has inflicted the greatest suffering on his fellow Chechens, whether through day-to-day oppression and corruption or through violent purges.

But the wars in Chechnya, in 1994-96 and 1999-2000, played a key role in brutalizing Russian society. The spread of technology allowed for the filming of war crimes, and, at the same time, the murders of Chechen civilians were routinely downplayed or excused in the Russian press. Violence against Russians was used to justify violence committed by Russians. Ensuing terrorism against civilian targets in Russia deepened the process of brutalization further: The Beslan school siege is one of the most soul-destroying examples.

Both then and now, what ends up in the news about Chechnya is usually the tip of the iceberg, as any seasoned observer will tell you, but even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the violence sown in the North Caucasus found ways of rippling out elsewhere.

After opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was gunned down not far from the Kremlin in 2015, the men convicted of the killing would prove to be connected to Kadyrov, though who hired them remains undisclosed. At the time, the smartest people I knew in Moscow, including academics, law enforcement officers, and businesspeople already scrambling to get out, were muttering that the murder was a sign—the “marginal” politics of Chechnya had been normalized in the heart of the Russian capital. “Things will get worse,” these people said. And so they did get worse.

Recordings of the horrific violence had arguably also been normalized. When director Kantemir Balagov included authentic videos of the torture and murder of Russian soldiers in his 2017 film Closeness, Western critics were naturally upset—while Russians didn’t bat an eye. I was in my last months in Moscow when that film came out, and I remember fainting in the theater—I had been given no warning as to what I was about to see—while the rest of the audience didn’t think it was a big deal.

A society where citizens brutalize one another and are brutalized by their own government is inevitably going to commit even greater acts of violence against anyone it perceives as both evil and weaker—remember that Russians initially didn’t count on Ukrainians to resist and are therefore all the more enraged by how their war is going now.

This leads us back to the brutality of the present day. In the video from Ukraine, which was likely filmed last year, due to the foliage present in the video, the perpetrator wears a balaclava as he is being cheerfully egged on by his friends. That these people know to conceal their faces likely means that they’ve done it before or know friends who have. The comparatively small weapon used suggests the desire to prolong the victim’s torture.

Other footage of beheaded Ukrainian soldiers began circulating around the same time. In occupied Popasna last year, the severed head of a Ukrainian POW was placed on a pole.

Russian terrorists fighting in Ukraine think the whole thing is extremely funny and promise more videos like it. Bloodthirsty propagandists such as Anton Krasovsky are meanwhile attempting to excuse it by pointing out that Ukrainians “aren’t people, they’re cosmic trash” or otherwise claiming that the video is staged.

In fact, the plan to terrorize Ukrainians by adopting so-called Chechen methods and using prominent “attack dogs” among Chechens loyal to the Kremlin has been in the works for a while. Some Putinists may find it distasteful and look away, but they are still on board with the overall objective.

If I were to do a forensic analysis of the video and those like it, I could spend many words outlining how the likes of the Wagner Group and other mercenaries are likely responsible. There are times, however, when forensics feels useless. This is a society where barbarism has triumphed and where it sets the agenda.

The idea that Wagner does not represent Russian troops as a whole has, for years, served the Kremlin well. It engenders a kind of plausible deniability. This is not, however, correct. The head of Wagner may be engaged in an on-again, off-again power struggle with regular Russian military officials, but it’s the sort of struggle that Putin finds useful and beneficial for now. Clan wars aid his war machine in that they prevent a challenger from rising up to face him directly. As such, the Russian war machine is doing exactly what it’s meant to be doing—directly aiding Putin and his clutch of friends while making everyone else miserable.

Wagner’s actions result in no accountability. There won’t be any court martials associated with the beheading video and other atrocities. Nobody is going to be punished. Nobody is even that shocked.

Russia doesn’t fight wars the way the United States does, and pearl-clutching comparisons to Iraq and whataboutism here are largely useless, too. What is useful is understanding exactly what you are dealing with. Russia is lawless, with zero meaningful oversight of its regular and irregular troops; it is growing more lawless; and it will seek to export its lawlessness at every turn.

And much like the brutality in Chechnya, what we see of Russians’ actions in Ukraine is the tip of a bloody iceberg. Individual tragedies that comprise the collective tragedy of the war will be unearthed for generations to come. Some of the horrors will come to light, and some will not. All are ultimately acceptable to Moscow, which needs a blistering defeat. In any other scenario, its bloody nihilism will never stop.