WSJ: Kadyrov’s men plunder Mariupol’s war-damaged Ilyich Iron and Steel Works

People close to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov are taking and selling equipment and scrap metal from the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works of Mariupol, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The plant was damaged by fighting in 2022, but unlike Azovstal, the city’s second steel plant, not so badly destroyed that it could not be restored. After the city was captured, it was run by a member of the Chechen government, Vakhit Geremeyev, in Kadyrov’s interests.

As the WSJ noted, Geremeyev claimed that Ilyich Iron and Steel Works could only process scrap metal and that his task was to protect the plant from theft and recommission it in 2026.

Under occupation, the plant got a new – Russian – owner, instead of Rinat Akhmetov’s Ukrainian Metinvest: LLC Ilyich MMK, established in August 2022, co-owned by Valid Vakhitovich Korchagin. This is 25-year-old Valid Geremeyev, the son of Vakhit Geremeyev.

According to a resident the WSJ cited, trucks with rolled metal products are still often taken out of the plant’s territory. In March, the local occupation authorities claimed that 130,000 tonnes of iron by-products worth $16 million had been taken from the plant over the previous six months, the WSJ noted, while Metinvest claims that a $220 million production line was dismantled and taken to Russia.

The WSJ also noted that, according to the 52wmb customs database, Russian companies bought steel, coal and containers from the plant in 2022, and in 2023, metal from Ilyich Iron and Steel Works was exported to Uzbekistan.

The WSJ suggested that control of Ilyich works was part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s loyalty payment to Ramzan Kadyrov and that Kadyrov’s position in Moscow had strengthened after the failed rebellion by his main rival, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in the summer of 2023. After Prigozhin died in a mysterious plane crash that year, Kadyrov incorporated some of the fighters from Prigozhin’s Wagner company into his forces and sent them back to Bakhmut while there were still battles for the city, the WSJ noted.

The handover of Ilyich Iron and Steel Works to the same forces that captured the city reminded WSJ journalists of the practice of rewarding Wagner’s men in Africa, where they received profits from natural resources in the territories they controlled.

As previously reported, companies associated with the Chechen leader’s entourage are also involved in the export and processing of rapeseed from the occupied south of Ukraine.