Chechen woman Belkisa Mintsaeva has been unreachable for three weeks since following her detention. She is being held in what human rights advocates describe as unlawful custody in a police department in the republic, according to representatives of the Kavkaz Bez Materi (‘Caucasus Without a Mother’) initiative.
According to the head of the project, Lidiya Mikhalchenko, the 33-year-old Mintsaeva was detained ‘without any grounds’ on 13 April in the Nadterechny district. She says the detention was linked to Mintsaeva’s attempt to regain custody of her children, who at that time were with her former husband.
On 24 April, activists reported that there had been no contact with the woman and that no formal charges had been brought against her, nor had she been granted access to a lawyer. Representatives of the initiative state that defence lawyers are unable to reach Mintsaeva and are being subjected to pressure.
‘Lawyers are not being allowed in and are being intimidated. She disappeared on 13 April, and there has been no information about her since’, the activists said.
Two years ago, the woman’s former husband, Sulim Delmukhanov, took their daughters Sabina and Diana while they were staying with their grandmother in Chechnya. Mintsaeva, who had been living in Novosibirsk, went to court. She has a stable job in the property sector and is able to support her daughters independently.
In August 2025, the Nadterechny District Court ruled that the elder daughter, 12-year-old Sabina, should live with her mother. The question of where the younger daughter, 9-year-old Diana, should live remained unresolved at that time, and she stayed with her father.
However, Diana kept asking her mother to come and collect her. In addition, the girls recorded a video message to Chechen Head Ramzan Kadyrov, begging him not to separate them from each other or from their mother. On 6 April 2026, Mintsaeva travelled to Chechnya and took her younger daughter to Novosibirsk. Following this, her former husband filed a report of child abduction against both Mintsaeva and an acquaintance who had accompanied her on the trip.
Furthermore, pressure began to be exerted on the woman’s relatives.
Her brother, who lives in Chechnya, was detained and allegedly threatened with being sent to fight in the full-scale war in Ukraine.
On 9 April, Mintsaeva published a video appeal addressed to the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, saying that her former husband was threatening her and her relatives. Due to these threats, including those directed at her brother, she returned to Chechnya, where she was subsequently detained without formal charges.
‘According to our information, all of this is happening solely to “reconcile” the couple and present the situation as normal’, the human rights advocates said.
The whereabouts of the man who accompanied her remain unknown. According to human rights advocates, he was also detained shortly after the child abduction complaint was filed.
‘The case of Belkisa Mintsaeva is a dangerous precedent that could affect any woman tomorrow. If today a mother can be declared a criminal for trying to be with her children, then no one is protected from such arbitrariness’, the advocates said.
