Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Chechnya on Tuesday and met with its leader Ramzan Kadyrov in his first visit to the North Caucasus region since 2011.
Kadyrov, a key Kremlin ally, says he has deployed thousands of fighters to the Kremlin in its offensive in Ukraine.
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Putin said in May that he planned to make a stopover in Chechnya at Kadyrov’s invitation, saying: “I will do everything imaginable to make this holiday happen. “
Footage released through the RIA Novosti news firm and Kadyrov showed Putin shaking hands with Kadyrov and other officials after stepping off his helicopter in the main city of Grozny.
Putin then put an arm around Kadyrov and hugged him as they boarded a limousine together.
Kadyrov wrote on Telegram that there would be a “packed calendar” of events.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich, despite a hard day’s work, is full of energy and able to stop at various locations in Chechnya,” he wrote.
Putin visited regions of the North Caucasus on Tuesday, including Kabardino-Balkaria and North Ossetia.
In North Ossetia, he visited the Beslan school where more than 330 people were killed in a 2004 siege by Chechen rebels and knelt before a monument.
Putin also met with mothers who lost their children and with the attackers at the hands of the Ukrainians who are recently preparing an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
Although Putin has rarely visited Chechnya in recent years, the region has shaped him as a politician.
He introduced the Second Chechen War in 1999 while still prime minister, which helped shape his reputation as a strongman and made him popular with many Russians.
Kadyrov, loyal to Putin, ruled Chechnya with an iron fist, seeking to eliminate a persistent Islamist and the entire dissident bureaucracy, and massively rebuild Grozny.
Putin appointed Kadyrov as the country’s new leader in 2007, when he was just 30, after his father Akhmat Kadyrov was killed by a stadium bomb in 2004.
On Tuesday, Putin began his stopover by laying flowers at Akhmat Kadyrov’s grave, the news firm Interfax reported.
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