A Chechen officer was slaughtered by shelling while bragging about defeating Ukrainian troops in battle on social media.
Chechnya's ruthless warlord leader Ramzan Kadyrov is a longtime and fervent ally of Vladimir Putin and has deployed troops to support the Russian tyrant and his brutal war in Ukraine.
According to state media, around 12,000 volunteers from the Russian republic have been recruited to fight for Moscow, the Daily Express reports.
In the TikTok clip, the unnamed Chechen commander is heard boasting about his troops' successes on the battlefield against Ukrainian forces.
Rating their performance as "five-plus", he claims just one member of the unit was injured.
But as he finishes his sentence, a shell explodes beside him, clouding the screen with a searing orange glow - and bringing the braggart's broadcast to a sharp halt.
Social media users speculated that his mobile phone signal may have made him an easy prey for a targeted missile attack.
One wrote: "That thing was basically giving anyone watching with the right equipment a 10-digit grid to his location.
"He basically called that round in on himself."
The Chechens have a reputation for brutality and have faced repeated accusations of committing war crimes.
The war in Ukraine has presented Kadyrov with a perfect opportunity to prove both his loyalty and ongoing usefulness to Putin.
The Chechen leader owes his position and power to the Kremlin, which bankrolls his regime.
In exchange for ensuring stability in Chechnya, Kadyrov receives huge subsidies from Russia's federal budget.
However, in recent years a decline in violence and insecurity in the region has led some inside Putin's administration to question whether Moscow should be sending the Chechen strongman so much money.
Kadyrov has proved a useful Kremlin tool in eliminating internal political dissent in Russia over the years.
Chechen forces are suspected to be involved in the assassination of the leading opposition figure, Boris Nemstov.
His commander in Mariupol Ruslan Geremeyev is believed to have organised the cold blooded shooting of the opposition leader right by the Kremlin walls in 2015.
Geremeyev was injured in late March while fighting Ukrainian forces in Mariupol.
Last Saturday, the warlord - who is said to be personally leading the devastating blitz on Mariupol - predicted the entire city would fall by Thursday.
Russian forces currently control most of the city with the final defences centred around the Azovstal steel plant.
Mariupol would be the biggest city to be seized by Russia since invading Ukraine in an attack that has taken longer than some military analysts expected, seen over five million people flee abroad and turned cities to rubble.
The last defence in the city is said to be centred on the Azovstal steel plant, along with about 1,000 civilians who are in hiding.
Mariupol, once a prosperous seaside city of 400,000, is now a wasteland where corpses lie in the streets as Russia slams the Azovstal steel plant with bunker-buster bombs, the government in Kyiv said.
