The situation has been dire in Ukraine ever since the Russia invaded earlier last month. Recently, horrific videos have circulated on social media of a Ukrainian MMA fighter being tortured and subsequently executed by a neo-Nazi group.
The middleweight fighter Maxim Ryndovskiy was reportedly being held hostage by Ukrainian nationalists. His ‘crime’ was training in Chechnya and visiting the separatist-controlled areas in Eastern Ukraine.
Political analyst Marina Dubovikova shared the videos on her Twitter account and had called his followers to spread the word before worse things happen to him.
“In Kyiv, local [I don’t know to fucking call them] extremists caught and brutally torture a famous Ukrainian athlete, MMA fighter, Maxim Ryndovsky. All his fault is that he trained with the Chechen club “Akhmat”,” Dubovikova tweeted.
Ryndovskiy apparently became a target of various Ukrainian far-right extremists after visiting the separatist-controlled Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR). He also trained in Akhmat MMA in Chechnya prior to the Russian invasion.
Chechen leader Kadyrov is more than a government official – he’s also a huge patron of Mixed Martial Arts. The dictator is very fond of combat sports- he owns the fighting promotion Absolute Championship Akhmat (ACA) formerly known as Absolute Championship Berkut.
Kadyrov was once a patron of Khabib Nurmagomedov and was even the one to break the news about his father’s passing publicly.
Training in AkhmatMMA with Ramzan Kadyrov.
Chechnya, Grozny.
Other sources also reported that Ryndovskiy was suspected to be a traitor for having Russian ties prior to the kidnapping.
In addition to those accusations, he is Jewish and had published various anti-war messages to his Twitch channel in recent weeks, which further angered Ukraine’s far-right political forces.
Ryndovskiy himself was a wrestling-based fighter, having fought professionally in the Ukrainian Professional League of Horting (UPLH) and winning his lone bout against Artem Klochko via TKO back in 2017.
The capture and torture of Ryndovskiy is an unfortunate byproduct of the war that’s currently raging in the area. Here’s to hoping the situation gets resolved as fast as possible.