Rags To Riches For Warlord Ramzan Kadyrov Who Switched Sides -- Times OnlineOn the final part of his journey down ‘Kidnap Highway’, Roger Boyes finds a strongman leader enforcing an uneasy stability in Chechnya
One of my self-imposed missions in dust-caked Grozny had been to find the shop that supplies the meat for the lions, panthers and leopards that populate the private zoo of warlord-turned-President Ramzan Kadyrov.
But the capital of Chechnya is in the midst of a pharaonic reconstruction and even the locals are getting lost. One engineer holed up in my bedbug-infected hotel, the Kavkaz, had shiny eyes when he talked of the building work. It was, he said, comparable to the great socialist projects, the dams and people’s palaces, the rebirth of Minsk, smashed by war.
“Forget the meat idea,” said my guide Sayed Magomed, a 23-year-old engineering student. “He gets sheep from a farm in eastern Chechnya and slaughters them himself - he doesn’t need anyone to do that for him.” Sayed is still fired with adrenalin after a Saturday morning spent on the latest Grozny craze, paintballing, a more or less harmless postmodern form of partisan warfare: you stalk, you shoot and no one gets killed. It could catch on.
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My Comment: Welcome to the new Russia.
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