The publication «That's How» spoke with a 64-year-old Chechen woman who was kidnapped by Kadyrov's men in July 2024 and tortured for a day and a half due to an anti-war phrase she said at the funeral of a young man killed in Ukraine. The woman fled to Estonia, but the authorities did not believe her story and denied her asylum.
In early July last year, a family was burying their 23-year-old son who died in the war in Ukraine. All the neighbors came to the wake, including Maryat Batalova with her daughter-in-law Lia. Maryat couldn't hold back and said just one phrase: «Why do you allow them to be sent to war? And how are your sons fighting in Ukraine better than the Russian soldiers who came to kill us in the two [Chechen] wars?»
A few days later, three Chechens in black broke into Lia's house, where she lived with her children, and Maryat. They started searching the house and then stated that Maryat had to go with them. As the elderly woman recounted, she was taken «by the scruff» out of the house and thrown into the back seat of a car, with her phone taken away. She was ordered to lower her head, so she saw the road vaguely. At some point, a paper bag was put over her head and she was led outside. Inside a semi-basement room, the bag was removed, and she was interrogated.
A man asked: «Who do you work for?» — and quoted Maryat's words from the funeral of the volunteer verbatim, she told journalists. The woman was beaten with pipes wrapped in foam to avoid leaving marks. The kidnapped woman was hit several times on the back and in the liver area. She remembers the dull blows and intense pain. They threatened to take her nephew, who was soon to turn 18, to war, and to marry off her underage nieces.
As Maryat recounted, the kidnappers turned on a soldering iron and waved it in front of her face; defending herself, she received several burns, and then she was tortured with electricity. The woman spent two days in captivity, during which time, as she recounted, she was not given food or water and was not taken to the toilet. Then she was brought and dropped off in a wasteland not far from her home. As it was later found out, her relatives bought her freedom for 350,000 rubles.
The elderly woman decided to flee Chechnya, and she was helped to leave Russia. Once in Estonia, she applied for asylum, but at the beginning of the year, on January 6, the Estonian Refugee Affairs Office denied Maryat Batalova international protection. The Estonian authorities deemed her story of torture and threats of persecution in Chechnya unfounded and unreliable. The court also doubted that a single anti-war statement «provoked such a sharp reaction from the Chechen authorities» and led to «detention and beating». The Estonian Court of Appeal on April 9 denied Batalova the status of an asylum seeker, not considering the threat «neither serious nor real». The woman was banned from entering the Schengen area for three years and was issued an order to leave Estonia for a third country.
* Recognized as a «foreign agent» in Russia.