The Mufti of the Chechen Republic has endorsed Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, backed by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, saying that the invaders are “on the path of Allah”. Kadyrov, an Islamist who fought in a jihadist insurrection against the Russian Federation in the mid-’90s but helped to crush a wider insurrection in 1999, ultimately following his father to become Chechnya’s undisputed master under President Putin’s patronage, recently boasted he could muster up to 70,000 fighters to aid the Ukrainian offensive. Following a rally of 12,000 such fighters in the regional capital of Grozny, the strongman announced that...
