A woman who was not afraid of Putin: how Amina Okuyeva turned a personal struggle into a war for Ukraine

Today, October 30, marks eight years since the murder of Amina Okuyeva, a Ukrainian surgeon, participant of the Revolution of Dignity and the war in Donbas, press secretary of the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion. Her name became a safeguard against amnesia: a reminder that the imperial policy of the Russian Federation has a personal price and a long geography — from Grozny to Kyiv.

Focus tells about Okueva's path and analyzes whether it is possible for similar figures to emerge today and why the Russian system itself constantly reproduces internal resistance. On October 30, 2017, bullets hit Amina Okuyeva, a Ukrainian of Chechen origin, a volunteer and combatant, who since 2014 has become one of the faces of international support for Ukraine in the war against Russian aggression near Glevakha near Kyiv.

Unknown persons opened fire on the car where Okuyeva and her husband Adam Osmaev were. Amina died on the spot, Osmaev was wounded. The attack was reported by Ukrainian and international publications, official comments at the time did not rule out a "Russian trace". She came to the front as a social activist and medic, joining the Dzhokhar Dudayev battalion, a formation of Chechen and Ukrainian volunteers created in 2014.

After the death of commander Isa Munayev near Debaltseve in February 2015, the unit was headed by Osmayev. The battalion itself fought in a number of key battles from Donbas until 2022. Their couple has long been in the focus of Russian special services and proxy structures. In June 2017, an attempt took place in Kyiv: a man who introduced himself as a "French journalist" opened fire on Osmaev. Okuyeva returned fire and wounded the attacker.

Subsequently, the Ukrainian and international media identified the "journalist" as Artur (Artur Abdulayevich) Denisultanov (Kurmakayev), connected to Ramzan Kadyrov's entourage. The investigation into Okueva's murder lasted for years. In January 2020, the National Police announced the arrest of part of a group of killers whose DNA matched the marks on the machine gun that shot Amina. In 2020, suspicion was announced against the suspected organizer.

At the end of 2023, the police of the Kyiv region reported: Hungary refused to extradite Russian Igor Redkin, whom Ukraine considers involved in the crime. In 2025, the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced a briefing on the "results of the investigation" and the arrest of the group's organizer. These steps do not remove all questions, but they confirm: the case is not "a dead load" and has a cross-border dimension.

The context in which Okuyeva lived and fought is a broader phenomenon of Caucasian volunteer formations on the side of Ukraine: in addition to the battalion named after Dzhokhara Dudayev, since 2014, the battalion named after Sheikh Mansur, which includes veterans of the Chechen wars, has been operating (with interruptions and renewals). In 2022, the unit became active again and works under the management of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.

It is symbolic that in 2022 the Verkhovna Rada recognized the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria as a territory temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation. It was a "political return" of the topic of Chechen resistance to the public space of Ukraine. The murder of Okueva is not a separate episode, but a fragment of a systemic mosaic. Since 2014, Kyiv has become a "refuge city" for critics of the Kremlin — and at the same time a field of dangerous operations.

A series of contract killings and assassination attempts against Chechen, Russian, and Ukrainian opponents of Moscow (from former State Duma deputy Denys Voronenkov to journalist Pavel Sheremet) created an atmosphere in which the line between "state" and "freelance killers" is blurred, but the motive — to settle accounts with the regime's enemies — remains unchanged. The story of the Okueva-Osmaev couple is embedded in this series.

Can a new figure of Okueva's scale emerge today - charismatic, motivated by the experience of a personal war with the Kremlin and capable of becoming the face of resistance? Paradoxically, Russia's internal policy itself is pushing for this. In 2022–2025, the most tangible "cracked places" are the North Caucasus and, first of all, Dagestan, where mobilization and disproportionate losses at the front in Ukraine hit the national identity and social fabric.

Against the background of intensifying repressions, spontaneous, "leaderless" forms of resistance are emerging — from local protests to sabotage, which are systematically recorded by analytical centers. At the same time, the Kremlin is fueling internal xenophobia and Islamophobia, which can be seen after the terrorist attack in "Crocus City Hall" on March 22, 2024: instead of targeted security, mass raids against people from Central Asia, discrimination in the labor and housing markets.

Such campaigns make the imperial center even more alien to millions of minority citizens — and, as the history of Chechnya shows, it is precisely from this "alienation" that political opponents of the Kremlin are born. For Ukraine, this has two projections.

The first is military-political: the presence of Chechen (and more broadly, Caucasian) volunteer units with a long memory of the war with Russia adds to Kyiv not only motivated fighters, but also a strong symbolic signal about the "coalition of the enslaved". The stories of Munayev, Okuyeva, Osmayev and the fighters of the battalions named after Dudayev and Sheikh Mansur are about this.

The second is strategic: when Kyiv recognized Ichkeria as temporarily occupied in 2022, Ukraine actually incorporated the Caucasian dimension into the broader framework of decolonization of the Russian Federation. This does not mean a quick "parade of sovereignties", but it makes the emergence of new symbolic leaders - people similar to Okueva - politically possible.

Such figures are usually born at the junction of the personal biography of the resistance, network support of the diaspora, and historical memory of the liberation wars. And these three elements exist in Caucasian communities today. At the same time, there is also a "brake". The Kremlin's repressive apparatus works ahead of schedule, and foreign operations against dissidents continue — a number of Kadyrov's critics have been killed/attacked in the EU; witnesses in "Chechen affairs" die.

This raises the price of leadership and forces potential "new Amins" to act conspiratorially or in a network format, without bright public roles. The story of Amina Okueva is not only about personal courage. It is about Russia's long war against those it could not conquer, and how the Ukrainian front became a platform for a coalition of peoples who remember their wars with the empire. New leaders of resistance in the Russian Federation are possible — primarily in the North Caucasus.