Window on Eurasia: Kadyrov Calls for Purge of ‘Traitors in the Kremlin’

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, December 23 – Chechen head Ramzan Kadyrov says that “traitors in the Kremlin, government and other power structures,” people who do not carry out the decisions of President Vladimir Putin, must be purged from office in order to improve the economy and block Western efforts to destabilize Russia.

 

            In an interview published in “Izvestiya” yesterday, Kadyrov, someone close to Putin who, like Vladimir Zhirinovsky, often floats trial balloons in a flamboyant way, said that if such officials are driven out, “all would be well for the economy of Russia” and that the West would suffer a defeat (izvestia.ru/news/580923).

 

            “We need not quantity but quality,” he continued. Unfortunately, “there are such people in the entourage of the president. Now the time has come to take concrete decisions and if someone doesn’t accept the decisions of our Supreme Commander, then they must leave out ship.”

 

            “If it were up to me,” Kadyrov said, I would have said to them a long time ago: ‘Salaam Aleikum.’ But our president is wiser – he takes decisions not immediately but in a very correct way. We will support any decision by Putin.”

 

            The Chechen leader said he did not understand “how a minister today can poke sticks in the wheels of the president. But if there are such, then the competent organs must without waiting for the decision of the president, punish him.  I consider that today a minister doesn’t have the right, but it isn’t necessary to punish him, it is necessary simply to drive him out.”

 

            In other comments, Kadyrov justified his own harsh policies in Chechnya as necessary and denounced the US for seeking to control Russia. President Barack Obama wants another Yeltsin he can push around and not Putin who is “a real patriot of Russia” and who is making the country strong and proud again.

 

            Those in Russia who support the American position are “traitors” and must be “expelled from councils, from the Social Chamber and other organizations,” Kadyrov concluded. “There must not be traitors in the Kremlin, in the government or anywhere else.” People must bring their children back from the US and Europe and have them study in Russia.