KADYROV’S HITMEN

run out of supplies of this critical natural resource sometime in the summer. Where did drinking water come from in 2013, thus shortly before the Russian annexation? Before, water procured from the Dnieper River in Ukraine, via the North Crimean Canal, made up 86.65 percent of the total water intake; local stocks equaled 8.7 percent; groundwater — 4.41 percent while and seawater — 0.16 percent. But following the peninsula’s annexation by Russia, Kyiv cut off water supplies from the Dnieper, forcing the occupiers to rely on local wells, ground water, and reservoirs. During a meeting on the socio-economic development of Crimea and Sevastopol last January, Russian President

sometimes these are hired guns.

Austrian capital, Vienna, on July 4 was Mamikhan Umarov, known as Anzor Umarov or Anzor of Vienna, a former Chechen separatist and a critic of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Umarov fled to Austria in 2005 where he lived under the name of Martin Beck. In 2007, he was granted refugee status. According to him, he left Chechnya as he feared that the authorities could start to look for new victims. In the past, he served as a police officer in Chechnya. Umarov also called himself a former member of Vladimir Putin criticized local officials for their inept attention to solving the water supply issue. Crimean authorities reportedly sought to buy Ukrainian water, but Kyiv refused. According to unofficial reports, bringing water back to Crimea is one of the Kremlin’s conditions to begin peace talks. The topic was high on the agenda of the December 2019 meeting of the Normandy Four in Paris as well as of Putin’s recent phone calls with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky. In Kyiv and elsewhere, concerns are that Russia will exploit the water crisis in Crimea to invade Ukraine, reportedly to “avoid a full-scale humanitarian

17 July 2020

KADYROV’S HITMEN

A Chechen asylum seeker was shot dead outside the Austrian capital whilst Georgian secret services have foiled a plot to kill a journalist. These seemingly look like two different stories yet have much more in common: they involve hitmen that kill either for the Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov or the Kremlin. Sometimes Russian special services get involved in assassinations,

Aman who was assassinated close to the disaster.” the security services of the separatist Republic of Ichkeria. He was killed by two other Chechen immigrants, a proof that the Europe-based Chechen diaspora is infiltrated by Kadyrov and his people. Shortly before the Vienna killing, Georgian secret services had thwarted a plot to assassinate a journalist who had made an verbal attack on Vladimir Putin on live television last year. Kadyrov often uses people in the Chechen diaspora in Europe to assassinate his enemies. Some estimates put the number of Chechens living in the European Union at over 100,000.