Questions and answers on grain theft and sanctions designations against Chechens

More questions than answers, really

It's a well-established fact that there's a world food crisis going on threatening the lives of millions.

That Russia's war on Ukraine is an intentional component of the food crisis is decently well-established, not particularly by any official Russian statement, but rather by Russia's pattern of actions.

Food theft from Ukraine is intuitively a part of that practice of intentionally incurring, exacerbating and leveraging a world food crisis, and is also borne out by pattern of actions.

The specific complicity of Chechens - specifically, Kadyrovites - in that food theft is well-established by eyewitness and victim reports as well as public reporting, and host-nation intelligence disclosures.

I have a pretty good guess on who handles the money for Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya's head of state, not just my boy Kenny Rakishev out of Kazakhstan (his name is "Kenes", but, I mean, come on) but also the rest of his inner circle; this is all very well-established by open reporting, and some of the names, interestingly, appear in the Panama Papers and Offshore Papers leaks (from tax-haven lawyers).

By himself, just based on who he is and who his connections are, it's not hard to put together a fairly compelling sanctions designation case just for people like Rakishev in Kadyrov's orbit, already. But that isn't newsworthy or meaningful - or, perhaps, as newsworthy and meaningful - as figuring out precisely who the hell is making money off this insane international food crisis Russia is creating, fixing their location, and getting their things taken by the U.S. government.

What I can't figure out is who specifically is handling the money Kadyrov's getting for stealing grain. I'm not even sure how he'd get that money, actually. There's a lot of attractive candidates around Kadyrov, including agriculture people in Chechnya; this has had me reading fairly boring press releases about Chechen farms for a day or so.

But I've been operating on the theory that Kadyrov is vertically integrated through this process - he's getting an ownership stake in the grain that he seizes, the way I'm figuring it, and that he has to be competing with separatists for who gets to seize what.

What if he's just a cog in this machine? He wasn't even in the Ukraine war until his little public show for Putin. What if he isn't getting "points on the package", and he's just hired muscle for seizing and (potentially) loading grain?

And what if the reason why separatists are seizing the banks, and the Chechens are seizing the grain, are the same reason - that is, some kind of deal that got made?

It's an interesting but somewhat useless theory unless there's some way to test it - to falsify it, in other words, some form of evidence disproving it that isn't there or can be argued against.

I think if you can answer these questions to a decently high evidentiary standard right now, though, you can actually do something about an ongoing, intentional international food crisis that threatens the lives of millions.