Chechen leader explains when Russian borders can change

It only happens when Moscow decides to do so, Ramzan Kadyrov says

Western hopes that Russia is going to be separated into several smaller states are in vain as only Moscow can decide on the shape of the country’s borders, the leader of Russia’s Republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, has said. 

“As for the breakdown of Russia, such attempts have been made by the West since the 1990s,” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram on Sunday. 

“Russian borders change only when it wants this itself,” the Chechen leader insisted, making it clear that those attempts won’t succeed.

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Сhechen leader predicts end of Ukraine conflict 

Kadyrov said that he wrote his post in response to an “overconfident expert” from Ukraine who predicted a scenario in which the Russian state is dissolved. 

The expert in question was most likely Aleksey Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, who claimed on Saturday that Russia was a colonial state that was going to fall apart anyway.

“There’ll be free Ichkeria [the name given to Chechnya by the separatists in the 1900s], Tatarstan, Dagestan. It’ll happen in the near future, and we need to prepare for this and don’t pretend that if they [Russia] have nuclear weapons, this won’t happen,” Danilov said.

Russian borders last changed in the fall when the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions joined Russia following referendums, in which the populations of those areas overwhelmingly supported this move.

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