‘Take me instead of her’: Chechen human-rights advocate tells Kadyrov to imprison him instead of his mother
Challenging the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, the man behind the unlawful case against his mother Zarema Musaeva, Musaeva’s son, the human rights advocate Abubakar Yangulbaev invited Kadyrov to release his mother and arrest him instead.
Abubakar Yangulbaev is an attorney who previously worked with the Russian Committee Against Torture. His brother, Ibrahim Yangulbaev, is one of the leaders of the Chechen opposition movement Adat. Their father, Saydi Yangulbaev, is a retired judge of the Chechen supreme court.
In early 2022, Chechen law enforcement abducted Zarema Musaeva in Nizhny Novgorod, forcibly bringing her to Grozny and keeping her in a pre-trial detention center, on charges of “resisting the police.”
Musaeva, who is in poor health, has now been unlawfully imprisoned for a year. In a Telegram video, her son Abubakar said:
Over this year, my mother’s health has only got worse. She should not be made responsible for what her sons did. And if you, Kadyrov, are a man, if you consider yourself the personification of maximal masculinity in this country, you must let her out. If that’s the way it is — if we’re living under wartime rules, and the law doesn’t work in Russia or in Chechnya — why don’t we exchange her for me. Let’s not touch the women. Take me instead of her.
After the abduction of Zarema Musaeva, Kadyrov said that the whole of the Yangulbaev family should be “either in prison or underground.”
