Eighteen-year-old Adam Kadyrov, son of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, has been awarded the title of Hero of the Chechen Republic for the second time, intensifying the spotlight on Russia’s deeply unequal wartime society. The honour was announced on Friday by Magomed Daudov, chairman of the Chechen government, who lauded the young Kadyrov’s “outstanding services to the state” and “active, fruitful activity in all-round support of the special military operation” in Ukraine. The decoration, pinned on by his father, coincided with the state holiday of Russia Day, underscoring the Kremlin’s narrative that the entire nation is mobilised behind the war—though the manner of that mobilisation differs radically by rank and region.

Adam Kadyrov first became a Hero of Chechnya in October 2023, aged 15, shortly after he was filmed beating Nikita Zhuravel, a detainee accused of burning a Koran, in a Grozny pre-trial detention centre. Since then he has accumulated a string of appointments—including assistant to the head of the republic and secretary of its security council—and on 31 May received a medal “for contribution to the special military operation.” Each accolade has been conferred by his father, reinforcing a system of personalist rule in which loyalty and kinship trump institutional norms.

Just days before the younger Kadyrov’s newest award, a rather different story unfolded near the frontline village of Sladkoe in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. There, on 27 May, 20-year-old Alexei Ulyunov was killed in action. A native of the Buryat village of Bakamensk, he had been a final-year student at a local agro-industrial technical college when, on 23 March 2025, he signed a contract with the Ministry of Defence and was dispatched as a drone operator. His death, quietly noted in a regional necrology, is emblematic of the disproportionate toll exacted on Russia’s ethnic minorities and rural poor—groups that Moscow has relied upon to fill its ranks while the sons of the elite accumulate honours far from the trenches. Viewed from Washington and London, the twin narratives expose a neo-feudal bargain: the Kadyrov clan delivers Chechen loyalty and a veneer of martial vigour, while sacrificial recruits from Buryatia and other distant federated entities shoulder the actual fighting.

Within Russia, independent outlets have noted that Ulyunov’s fate follows a pattern already seen in the case of another Buryat student drone operator who died earlier this spring. This drip of casualties from the periphery seldom troubles the official discourse of national unity. Yet it fuels a cynicism that analysts believe could, over time, corrode the regime’s legitimacy. The war has become a machine that consumes the marginalised and rewards the connected—a dynamic as old as empire, but newly visible thanks to the digital traces left by grieving relatives and the persistence of a few intrepid journalists.

The long-term consequences are difficult to predict. Some observers argue that the Kremlin is storing up resentment that will surface when the shooting stops, while others point to the regime’s proven capacity to manage dissent through repression and propaganda. What is already clear is that the sacrifice demanded of a Buryat teenager counts for less than the “comprehensive support” offered by a Chechen princeling. On Russia Day, that hierarchy was once again placed on ceremonial display.