New cases of detention have resulted in forced military service for Chechen residents.

Security forces carried out mass arrests of residents of several Chechen villages in the first ten days of May, and many of those detained were forced to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense, activists reported. A human rights activist attributed the raids and arrests to a shortage of volunteer contract soldiers.

As reported by "Caucasian Knot," in April, activists reported a new wave of mass arrests in Chechnya. According to them, there could be "hundreds of people in recent days." It was claimed that some of the detainees were being taken to military registration and enlistment offices and forced to sign contracts for deployment to the SVO, while their relatives were being demanded to pay monetary compensation. According to activists, 60-year-old Chechen resident Mimbulatov, who was detained along with his two sons, died in a security agency detention center.

Activists reported a new wave of detentions of Chechen residents

A Chechen opposition group in exile, monitoring human rights violations in the republic, reported new cases of local residents being detained for the purpose of forcing them to be sent to the combat zone.

Information about detentions in several villages was disseminated on May 7 and 8. According to activists, approximately 20 people were abducted in the village of Novy Sharoy. At least five people were detained in Samashki, and almost 30 people in Novye Atagi. On May 10, raids by security forces were reported in the village of Valerik, in areas known as "Komari Besh" and "First Pond," where, according to activists, "officers ambush young people, accusing them of drug use."

The fate of most of these detainees remains unknown, but some of them have already been forced to sign contracts, a representative of the opposition group that reported the arrests told a "Caucasian Knot" correspondent on May 18.

Some paid off with large sums of money.

"We rarely learn about the fate of those abducted. However, in the recent abductions, we can say that most were forced to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense. Some paid off with large sums of money," he said.

According to his information, The wave of arrests "is still ongoing," and the authorities are now issuing summonses en masse. "Just today [May 18], we learned that the regime has started issuing summonses to everyone in order to recruit even more people," the activist said. According to the opposition group, 60-year-old Mimbulatov was not detained for deployment to the war zone. "Mimbulatov ended up in the station because of his sons, who were the main target [of the security forces]. Fortunately, so far, there has been no targeted hunt for the elderly," the activist said. There is no trend toward forced enlistment of minors in military units due to the formal requirement of adulthood when signing a contract, he noted. "Teenagers are most often abducted as part of systemic repression, attempts to intimidate, 're-educate,' or because of some incident in which a minor is suspected of being the perpetrator," the activist said.

Human rights activists receive indirect information about detentions

The Civic Assistance Committee (included in the foreign agent registry) has not received any direct complaints about the May detentions, Svetlana Gannushkina, head of the committee (included in the foreign agent registry), told a Caucasian Knot correspondent.

This is what we hear from people visiting Chechnya.

However, the human rights activist noted that she receives information about the detentions indirectly. "We hear about this from people coming from Chechnya and contacting us for various reasons," she said.

Lawyers have voiced ways to avoid coercion to send Chechen residents to Ukraine

According to Gannushkina, the pressure on residents of the republic will only increase, since the resource of voluntary recruitment is being exhausted.

"It is quite possible that in In Chechnya, the number of people willing to participate in the Special Military Operations is falling – there are simply significantly fewer available soldiers left. It's natural to assume that the pressure to sign a contract will increase," the human rights activist said.

Gannushkina doesn't consider the death of the 60-year-old detainee to be exceptional. According to her, age and other restrictions on forced contracting have long ceased to be observed, including outside of Chechnya.

A seven-month pregnant woman in Moscow was offered a contract.

"The boundaries [of recruitment] have long been expanded to infinity, and not only in Chechnya. One of our applicants, seven months pregnant, was offered a contract in Moscow during a criminal investigation. She consulted with me, and I couldn't figure out which of them was crazy. "Perhaps officials are also held accountable for such proposals," Svetlana Gannushkina said.

Gannushkina also believes that the practice of pressuring the relatives of detainees is long-standing, especially in Chechnya. "Pressure on relatives is constantly used in Chechnya for various purposes – family ties are strong, and collective responsibility is the norm there," the human rights activist said.

16:00 28.03.2026

Human rights activists question the voluntariness of Chechen prisoners signing contracts

Data on the number of prisoners sent from Chechen colonies to the SVO zone cannot be verified, but the voluntariness of the contracts signed with the Ministry of Defense is questionable, human rights activists noted.

As a reminder, in January 2025, volunteers who arrived in Chechnya to sign a military contract complained that they were being kept locked up for weeks, to send them to the war zone in place of local residents who had paid their way out of military service. According to human rights activists, forced contracts are practiced in Chechnya, and security forces may create an "exchange fund" from volunteers arriving from other regions who will sign contracts in place of local residents.

In September 2024, it became known that security forces had detained five Azerbaijani citizens in Chechnya and were forcing them to sign military contracts; Following the release of this information, the foreign citizens were released and returned home. The Russian Special Forces University, a training center established by Ramzan Kadyrov in Gudermes, trains volunteers for deployment to war zones and is home to the Akhmat special forces unit, according to the Caucasian Knot report "What They Teach at Putin's Special Forces University in Chechnya."