Soldiers Make Secret Pact to ‘Destroy’ Putin’s Empire From Within

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine—The horrors of Ukraine are an eerily familiar sight for Maga, a 30-year-old Chechen fighter who spoke with The Daily Beast using his codename.

“The same torture, the same mass graves…the things the Russians are doing in Ukraine, they were doing back in Chechnya,” Maga told The Daily Beast from his unit’s hideout in eastern Ukraine last month. “They just come and destroy everyone who could be against their power.”

Having fought first to defend Kyiv—and then in the battles for the liberation of the Kharkiv region—Maga said the atrocities he has seen in Putin’s invasion match stories told by his relatives, who fought in the wars for Chechen independence from the Russian Federation in the 1990s.

Read more at The Daily Beast.