Human rights activists have identified the reason for the pressure on Belkisa Mintsayeva.

Belkisa Mintsayeva's ex-husband, who accused her of kidnapping their youngest daughter, demanded that she provide power of attorney to sell her apartment in exchange for custody of the children, the human rights project "Motherless Caucasus" reported.

As "Caucasian Knot" reported, on May 28, Deputy Prime Minister of Chechnya Akhmed Dudayev published a short video featuring Belkisa Mintsayeva, who stated that she was doing well and asked that her situation not be made into a news story. According to the human rights activist, the video raises doubts, in particular because she failed to inform her family that she did not need help. A report about Mintsayeva on the Grozny TV channel claimed that her family had "recovered," but Belkisa's friends said she looked depressed in the video.

The persecution of Belkisa Mintsaeva, whom security forces in Chechnya held in a police station for at least a month and a half, was orchestrated by her ex-husband, the "Motherless Caucasus" project reported today on its Telegram channel.

Human rights activists recalled that Mintsaeva took her youngest daughter, who lived with her father, "at her tearful request." The ex-husband subsequently filed a complaint accusing the mother of his children of kidnapping her. According to the project, Belkisa Mintsayeva's ex-husband never worked and was motivated by "pure greed, not paternal love." He also knew who to contact in the security forces to have Mintsayeva detained: he regularly provides "various small favors" to local law enforcement.

"He was willing to cede custody of both daughters to Belkisa, but only in exchange for the price of her apartment in Novosibirsk," the publication states.

According to human rights activists, the entire time Belkisa Mintsayeva was in the police station, her children's father demanded that she sign a power of attorney to sell her apartment. Belkisa "demonstrated firmness," and officials and security forces, given the publicity surrounding her story, "did not want to answer to their superiors in Moscow" for her ex-husband's whim.

The report notes that human rights activists were repeatedly contacted by persistent "anonymous well-wishers" at the same time: they claimed that Belkisa "would have been released long ago if not for the publicity."

Men from the North Caucasus regions often take their children and bring them back to their home countries, from where it is then quite difficult to return them, even if the court rules that the child stays with the mother. The situation, according to human rights activists, is particularly difficult in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya.

In the North Caucasus, the tradition is that children should be raised in the father's family. As a result, mothers often find themselves separated from their children after divorcing their husbands and spend years trying to get the opportunity to at least see their children, according to a report from the "Caucasian Knot" "Maria Smelaya is one of the mothers who was separated from her children in the Caucasus".