Out of dozens of soldiers running for parliament on Oct. 26, one stands out.
Her name is Amina Okuyeva, she is a member of the Kyiv-2
volunteer battalion who poses on her Facebook page in a Muslim headscarf and
camouflage fatigues while holding a Kalashnikov rifle in her hands. Quotes from the Koran adorn
the top of the photograph.
Okuyeva is a surgeon by training, and is the
battalion’s paramedic. The ethnic Chechen said she put the Kalashnikov shown in the picture to good use while serving for over a month on the front lines near Debaltseve
in Donetsk Oblast.
Now she believes she has to take her fight to the
legislature because “the war is not only happening on the front lines.”
Okuyeva, 31, has personal reasons to take up the
political fight against Russian President Vladmir Putin. She
was born in Odesa but spent some five years in Chechnya in the early 2000s,
where she felt what the Second Chechen War was like when Chechen rebels
and the Russian army clashed.
In February 2012, her common law husband Adam Osmayev was
arrested in Odesa and accused of plotting, along with two accomplices, an
assassination attempt on Putin before his re-election. At the time, the story
sparked speculation that it was a ploy to boost Putin’s performance in polls.
Osmayev initially confessed, but then retracted his
statement, saying he made it under police pressure. Although Ukraine has
refused to extradite him, Osmayev has been kept in a pre-trial detention center
in Odesa. Okuyeva has written stacks of appeals to the government, but the case
has not moved since May.
Okuyeva took part in the EuroMaidan
Revolution and then went to fight against Russian aggression in eastern
Ukraine after a month of military training.
She believes that many of the Maidan’s aspirations are yet
to be achieved, and being in parliament is a way to do it. So she decided to
run as an independent candidate in a single-mandate constituency in her home
city of Odesa.
“The Maidan stood not only for the ouster of criminals in power
but also to make changes in the entire system,” she said. “These things need to
be done not by standing with posters by the Verkhovna Rada but inside.”
She wouldn’t provide any details of her program but
promised she would do it after the Central Election Commission registers her candidacy. The deadline for registration runs out at the end of the month.
Political consultant Taras Berezovets says that while war combatants in new the Verkhovna Rada are set to radicalize it, they will
not reinforce it with new ideas – and Okuyeva is not an exception.
Okuyeva said she plans to spend a minimum amount of
money on her campaign and will rely on volunteers and donations. “If I had
money I would rather spend it on the needs of my battalion,” she said.
If she gets elected Okuyeva said she would cooperate
with other EuroMaidan activists and members of volunteer battalions, without
mentioning any particular political force. In case she fails, Okuyeva said she
would definitely go back to the embattled east of Ukraine since she fears that fuller-scale warfare will restart soon.
Okuyeva said that in Ukraine, the Kremlin is using methods
similar to those used in Chechnya in previous decades to quash attempts of
the Chechen people led by their ex-President Dzhokhar Dudayev to gain independence
from Russia. Initially Russian intelligence orchestrated opposition to
Dudayev and supplied it with money and weapons. Then it secretly sent Russian experts to train the anti-Dudayev forces, and after that it brought the
regular Russian army troops to support them.
Thus, many Chechens are now trying to support Ukraine
in its war against Russia.
“These (Chechen) guys are coming from all over the
world to help Ukraine against the Russian aggression as it is our common enemy
now,” Okuyeva said.
Recently, a group of Chechens organized their own unofficial
Dudayev peacekeeping battalion to train and support Ukrainian troops.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached
at [email protected]
