This should really go in the Russia watch thread, but since that's on lockdown, I'll just add it here:
The president of the Republic of Tsjetsjen, Ramzan Kadirov, has called upon all Tsjetsen men to "lock up their women, and forbid them from using WhatsApp".
This, in response to public criticism against the marriage of a friend of president Kadirov (he even attended the wedding himself), Nazjud Gutsjigov, a 47 year old chief of police, with a 17 year old girl.
According to the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, mr. Gutsjigov had pressured the parents into arranging the wedding, threatening them to abduct the girl, and cause them a lot of trouble if they would not comply. Apparently, it went so far that the police force surrounded the village they lived in, to prevent the family from fleeing.
The president reacted furiously to the story in the Russian newspaper. He called it "slander, spread by a bunch of liberals". The journalist who wrote the story has fled the country, and the Tsjetsjen minister of Information has been fired over the incident.
While president Kadirov had not much trouble censoring the article away from local written media, he found out it was not so easy to remove the story from social media.
Hence he called upon the Tsjetsjen men to "lock them up (the women), and forbid them to go outside: maybe that will teach them not to post everything on social media. Family honour is a most valuable thing! Men, remove your women from WhatsApp!"
According to the law, mr. Gutsjigov was not allowed to marry the girl in the first place, because he was not divorced from his first wife. The Tsjetsjen Republic is part of the Russian Federation, and Russian law forbids polygamy.
The Russian justice department does not seem to be willing to make any case against it though. The Russian child ombudsman, Pavel Astakhov, claims to have studied the case, but not to have found anything illegal. He even defends the choice of the 47 year old police chief of marrying such a young bride, claiming that "women in the Tsjetsjen region more often than not look as old and withered away at age 27 as normal Russian woman do at age 50".
That's woman's rights in Russia for you, apparently. Or at least in Tsjetsjenia