The Chechen commander who fought – and died – for Ukraine

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The bloody fall of Debaltseve, a strategic transport hub in eastern Ukraine, will be remembered as the moment when Russian-backed separatists established their clear military supremacy over the poorly equipped Ukrainian army.

It was also a siege during which Vladimir Putin's wars began to blend into one.

Though it's still unclear precisely how many people were killed in the three-week battle, one of those known to have died was Isa Munayev, a military commander from faraway Chechnya who had led a group of volunteers that joined the fight on the Ukrainian side.

During the siege of Debaltseve, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko also reached out to another old enemy of Mr. Putin's: He made former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili an adviser and special representative of Ukraine to the international community.

Mr. Munayev and Mr. Saakashvili had both faced Mr. Putin before: Mr. Munayev 16 years ago, when he led the defence of his native Grozny against Russian troops; Mr. Saakashvili in 2008 when his country fought a brief and hopeless war against Russia over the breakaway enclave of South Ossetia.

Mr. Putin was a rookie prime minister in the fall of 1999 when he first earned his tough-guy reputation by sending the Russian army back into Chechnya (a small, largely Muslim republic that won effective independence from Moscow in a 1994-1996 war), accusing Chechen "terrorists" of carrying out a series of mysterious apartment-block bombings in and around Moscow.

The first hurdle Mr. Putin's army encountered was Mr. Munayev, who had been appointed by the Chechen government to oversee the defence of its capital city, Grozny.

Mr. Munayev was then 34, a police officer hardened into a warrior by the first Russian-Chechen war. He was outnumbered and outgunned – much like the pro-Ukrainian forces would be 16 years later during the siege of Debaltseve – but he dragged the battle out for months. He and a few hundred fighters would later remain in Grozny much longer, conducting hit-and-run operations against the "occupying" Russian forces.

Mr. Putin was 47 when the battle began and a political novice. By the time the battle of Grozny was over, the ex-KGB man would have succeeded Boris Yeltsin to become Russia's second post-Soviet president, with sky-high approval ratings that he maintains to this day.

Mr. Munayev eventually escaped into exile in Denmark. There, he joined the Chechen "government-in-exile" and declared his eternal opposition to both Mr. Putin and Ramzan Kadyrov, the vicious warlord installed and funded by Mr. Putin as Chechnya's new pro-Moscow leader. Mr. Munayev, who belonged to the old school of the Chechen rebellion – secularists who based their claim for independence on history and culture rather than radical Islam – was also a harsh critic of the extremist Caucasus Emirate that has continued the fight with attacks on civilian targets around Russia.

Last fall, Mr. Munayev arrived in the river city of Dnipropetrovsk, declaring that he had formed a Chechen battalion to aid Ukraine in its fight against the separatists who had taken over chunks of Ukraine's southeast. Like many in Ukraine and the West, he saw Mr. Putin's hand behind the rebel army of Novorossiya – or "New Russia" – a tsarist-era term that Mr. Putin resurrected.

"They [the Russians] took everything from us, I had to bury all my relatives, my daughter. … We are here now on a mission to save Ukraine," the now 49-year-old Mr. Munayev told Reuters in September. In photos posted online, his hair and beard were much more grey than when he fought in Grozny, but he still cradled his Kalashnikov rifle naturally.

It was never clear how many men Mr. Munayev had under his command in Ukraine, but his Dzhokhar Dudayev International Peacekeeping Battalion (named after the man who led Chechen forces during the first war against Russia) almost certainly had more battle experience than most of those fighting on the Ukrainian side. They were partly supplied through a fund set up by Dnipropetrovsk's billionaire governor, Ihor Kolomoisky, and then deployed to front-line Debaltseve.

As Mr. Munayev went to the front, Mr. Saakashvili took to the airwaves on behalf of Ukraine, repeating some of the same lines that he shouted as Russian troops pushed toward the Georgian capital of Tbilisi during that 2008 war. Fluent in English and Ukrainian, Mr. Saakashvili compares Mr. Putin to Hitler and warns that the Russian leader will not stop his aggression against his neighbours until the West makes him.

Meanwhile, Georgia's new government, anxious not to offend Moscow, has requested Mr. Saakashvili's arrest and extradition to Tbilisi on charges of abuse of power.

(Russia's military offensives in places like Debaltseve and South Ossetia can be seen as moves countering Western "soft power" advances on the geopolitical chessboard. Ukraine, like Georgia before it, had a pro-Western revolution then took steps toward joining the European Union and NATO. Georgia was taught its lesson in 2008, and is now much more deferential to the Kremlin's interests. Ukraine is arguably in the midst of receiving the same treatment.)

In another echo of past conflicts, Mr. Munayev's men may well have encountered other Chechens in Debaltseve who were fighting in militias loyal to Mr. Kadyrov and Mr. Putin. Videos have emerged showing small numbers of kadyrovtsy – forces fiercely loyal to Mr. Kadyrov – training and fighting in eastern Ukraine, and several Chechen fighters have told Western journalists they were sent to Ukraine by Mr. Kadyrov to aid the separatist cause.

Ukrainian defenders of Debaltseve have claimed there were Chechen irregulars fighting on the other side, some of whom cried out "Allahu Akbar" – "God is great" – as the pro-Russian forces advanced.

Just like in Grozny 16 years earlier, Mr. Munayev and his troops were surrounded and outgunned. But this time – perhaps because they weren't fighting on land they had grown up on – there was no escape. He was directly hit by a shell, fired from either a tank or large artillery piece, on Feb. 1.

Ukraine's war has created some strange alliances, perhaps none stranger than the affiliation between Mr. Munayev's Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion, which is made up of Muslim Chechens, and Mr. Kolomoisky, the Jewish-Ukrainian oligarch who has thrown a large share of his own personal resources into the fight to keep the Russian-backed separatists from reaching Dnipropetrovsk.

"This is unique. We have absolute beautiful relations between the Jewish and Muslim communities in Dnipropetrovsk. … We are thankful to Mr. Putin for uniting our country," said Pavlo Khazan, the head of the National Defence Foundation, an organization funded by Mr. Kolomoisky and other businessmen that buys supplies for pro-Ukrainian fighters, including the Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalion.

Mr. Khazan was one of the speakers at a memorial service held in Dnipropetrovsk last week to honour the "martyr" Mr. Munayev. "The Chechen people came to our aid because they understand all too well what invasion by the Russian terrorists means," Mr. Khazan told the crowd.

In the faces of the mourners – many of them Chechens wearing battle fatigues – sadness mingled with decades of built-up hate.

@markmackinnon