MOSCOW (Reuters) -Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said on Wednesday one of his senior commanders was alive and well, dismissing reports that he had been killed or wounded in Ukraine.
The commander, Adam Delimkhanov, heads the Chechen division of the Russian national guard and is also a member of Russia's parliament. He is widely seen as the Caucasian region's second most senior official after Kadyrov himself.
Kadyrov, who has led Chechnya since 2007 and is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in a post on the Telegram messenger app that Delimkhanov was "alive and well and not even wounded".
Kadyrov added that he had known Delimkhanov was uninjured from the start of what he called "a fake information attack", but had remained silent in order to embarrass Ukrainian media outlets which had reported on the commander's alleged injury.
Delimkhanov, who has an active social media presence, with over half a million followers on Telegram, did not comment.
Earlier on Wednesday, Russia's Zvezda television channel cited the parliamentary press service as saying that Delimkhanov had been wounded in Ukraine. It followed rumours on Ukrainian social media channels that the Chechen commander had been killed in an artillery strike in southern Ukraine.
Asked about the reports of Delimkhanov being wounded, the Kremlin earlier on Wednesday said it was "worried" and was waiting for clarification about what had really happened.
Delimkhanov, a former Chechen separatist who switched sides to Moscow along with much of the region's present leadership, has taken a prominent role in Russia's military campaign in Ukraine, commanding Chechen forces in Mariupol in the conflict's early days.
(Reporting by Reuters, Editing by Gareth Jones, Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan)
