Mariupol became an emblem of Russia’s destruction early in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago. Now the ruined port city is war bounty, enriching allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin .
Moscow’s forces crippled one of the city’s two giant steel mills, Azovstal , while crushing some of Ukraine’s fiercest resistance to the onslaught. Its crosstown peer, the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works, largely withstood the bombing and is now being scavenged and fenced by powerful Kremlin allies, according to the steelworks’ current and former managers and Russian corporate records.
Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov and his associates are removing and selling off modern metallurgical equipment, shipping scrap metal to Russia for use by its sanctions-crimped carmakers and hawking industrial gases to Moscow’s space program, according to the managers and documents.
Kadyrov hails from Chechnya, where he has carved out a fiefdom inside the Russian Federation. Chechnya’s ruling clan has long been a staunch Putin ally and now is receiving compensation, say observers.
In 2007, Kadyrov took over the presidency of the Caucasian republic that his father once ruled and wiped out the remnants of an Islamist insurgency. He created a personality cult built on theatrics and authoritarianism. The U.S. government in 2017 sanctioned him for extrajudicial killings and other human-rights violations.
In August, the warlord published a video of himself driving a Tesla Cybertruck with what looked like a mounted machine gun, pledging to send it to Ukraine’s front lines.
Over more than two decades in power, Putin has rewarded the loyalty of Kadyrov and other top lieutenants with protection and state largess. The conquest of new territories in Ukraine has offered up fresh spoils for plunder.
“The Kadyrov clan—the Kremlin gave them powers and awards,” said Ukrainian lawmaker Serhiy Taruta , whose home in Mariupol was taken over by a Kadyrov commander the day the city fell. “What the Kremlin does not give, they take it anyway.”
In numerous videos posted online, Chechen fighters in Mariupol, including Kadyrov’s own teenage sons, have staked a claim to large parts of the city, Russia analysts have said.
Kadyrov’s favor with the Kremlin rose last year after his main rival, Evgeny Prigozhin , founder of the Wagner mercenary force, criticized the Russian Army’s high command and launched an abortive rebellion in June 2023. Prigozhin died in a plane crash two months later, apparently targeted by the Kremlin.
The Chechen’s loyalty was rewarded when he absorbed some of Wagner’s fighters and redeployed his troops in Prigozhin’s former stronghold of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.
Kadyrov’s biggest prize was the conquest of Mariupol, a prosperous port city of 431,000 people before Russia’s invasion and a big industrial export hub on the Black Sea. His men joined an onslaught that leveled much of the city.
Kadyrov sent a trusted lieutenant, Vakhit Geremeev , to seize the Ilyich works, a sprawling complex where 1,000 Ukrainian marines had been hunkering down. A lieutenant and a nephew of Geremeev, previously a Kadyrov police chief, were investigated in 2015 for the murder of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov , according to Russian state media and the U.S. government.
Before the war, taxes paid by Ilyich and Azovstal funded more than one-third of Mariupol’s annual budget. “It fed the entire city,” Geremeev later said, referring to Ilyich, the larger of the two plants.
Ilyich after the fighting was an apocalyptic cathedral of twisted steel but remained functional.
A bird sits on a cross amid newly-made graves at a cemetery in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict in the settlement of Staryi Krym outside Mariupol, Ukraine May 15, 2022. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
“There were a lot of corpses,” Geremeev said in an interview with pro-Russian Mariupol media early this year. “Everything was mined,” he said in a video posted online, walking through the plant in military fatigues.
Russian authorities say Azovstal is too damaged to be rebuilt and will be turned into an industrial zone. Kadyrov and Geremeev had bigger ambitions for Ilyich.
Since soon after Moscow’s forces took control of Mariupol, a newly created local company, LLC Ilyich MMK , began exporting steel taken from the inoperative plant, according Russian officials and plant managers quoted by Russian-controlled state media. The company was registered in August 2022 by two men, one of whom is listed as Valid Vakhitovich Korchagin , according to Russian corporate records.
Korchagin is Geremeev’s 25-year-old son, according to Metinvest, Ilyich’s legal Ukrainian owner. Korchagin’s phone numbers and his social accounts are registered under the name Valid Geremeev .
Korchagin’s equal partner in the new company was a military-connected Russian businessman named Yuri Murai . According to an official presentation of Murai’s other company, freighter Alliance Service, he had transported cargo for the Ministry of Defense to occupied Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Kadyrov, Geremeev, Korchagin, Murai and the Kremlin didn’t return requests for comment.
The corporate takeover of the Ilyich plant by the same clan that seized it militarily mirrors Wagner’s longstanding practice in Africa, where it provided mercenaries in exchange for control of valuable natural resources.
The entrance of the Ilyich steelworks is adorned with a portrait of Kadyrov and the logo of his Chechen militia, according to a picture seen by The Wall Street Journal. Trucks loaded with rolled metals frequently leave its gates, bound for Russia, according to a local resident who spoke to the Journal.
In March, the Russian-backed authorities said 130,000 tons of iron byproducts, potentially valued at $16 million, had been shipped from the plant over the preceding six months. Metinvest, Ilyich’s former owner, said the plant’s occupants also dismantled a production line valued at $220 million that had been installed just before the war and sent it to Russia.
Geremeev, the Kadyrov deputy, said in the online video that, for now, the plant’s workshops can only process leftover inventories of scrap metal and iron byproducts but he is working to reopen the steel mills by 2026. He said he wants to protect Ilyich from looting.
“I have already fallen in love with it, I have almost become a metallurgist,” he said in the interview with pro-Russian media.
Mariupol’s exiled mayor, Vadym Boychenko , said in an interview that Ilyich products are being recycled to make trucks and cars in Russia or by the construction industry. A Moscow-based trader bought steel cargoes valued at $380,000 in September 2022, according to customs database 52wmb. Other Russian companies have picked up containers and coal left at the plant, according to those records. In January 2023, a cargo of $50,000 of metals was exported from the plant to Uzbekistan, according to 52wmb.
Last year another Kadyrov associate, Alash Dadashov , stepped in as a joint-owner of the Ilyich steel plant, according to Russian corporate records. Dadashov, who didn’t return a request for comment, runs the Moscow branch of a Chechen martial-arts club controlled by Kadyrov, according to the U.S. Treasury. Through another company, LLC Technical Materials , Dadashov and a former Azovstal executive also sell industrial gases out of Mariupol, according to Russian corporate records and the company’s website. Among his customers, according to the records, is Russian space agency Roscosmos .
Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com
