Several Chechen diaspora communities in Europe have protested the extradition of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian FSB agent convicted in Germany for the murder of Ichkerian commander Zelimkhan Khangoshvili.

Isa Daduev, coordinator of the Assembly of Chechens of Europe, told OC Media that protests were held in France, Austria, and Germany to express disagreement with the extradition of Krasikov back to Russia. Krasikov previously received a life sentence from a Berlin court in 2021 for the murder of Khangoshvili, a Georgian of Chechen origin.

According to a RFE/RL report, in addition to the flag of Ichkeria, a short-lived Chechen republic in the 1990s, protesters also held posters with the names of North Caucasian political prisoners serving sentences in Russian colonies. Among these were Abdulmumin Gadzhiev, a journalist from Dagestan, Zarema Musaeva, the mother of the Chechen oppositionist Yangulbaev brothers, and Said-Mukhammad Dzhumaev, who took part in a rally in support of Alexei Navalny and was condemned for a fight with riot police.

‘If an exchange were to take place, then at least one Chechen out of a thousand convicts should have been on the list’, Daduev said.

The diaspora was also outraged by the fact that neither the diaspora itself nor Khangoshvili’s family were informed of Krasikov’s release.

‘The disrespectful attitude that the Europeans illustrate is a great underestimation of the Chechens in serving Russia and America’, Daduev noted.

[Read more: Khangoshvili murder trial kicks off in Berlin]

Dzhambulat Suleymanov, leader of the United Force movement, which held a protest in Paris, also criticised German authorities for not notifying Khangoshvili’s family of the extradition.

‘Germany exchanged the killer for Putin’s prisoners without notifying the family of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili. Moreover, there was not a single Chechen on the list of those exchanged. The liberated Russian “liberals” did not even deign to express words of condolences to the family of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili’, Suleymanov wrote.

Daduev believes that such actions ‘only lower the reputation of the intelligence services of European states’ and that impunity ‘opens the door to the continuation of the crime’.

The prisoner exchange took place at an airfield in Turkey on 1 August, during which Russian intelligence agents convicted in Europe were returned to Moscow, and opposition politicians and journalists imprisoned in Russia were released.

Read in Russian on SOVA.News.