Hundreds of people gathered at Moscow’s Avtozavodskaya metro station on February 6 to commemorate the third anniversary of the 2004 terrorist attack that killed 42 and wounded 250, the Moscow Times reported on February 7. According to Ekho Moskvy radio, friends and relatives of the... MORE

- KILLERS OF SVERDLOVSK POLICE IN CUSTODY On February 5, the deputy chief of Sverdlovsk Oblast’s main police department, Viktor Berdnikov, told journalists in Yekaterinburg that all of the suspects in an attack on Sverdlovsk policemen in Chechnya in September 2006 have been arrested, ITAR-Tass... MORE

During his most recent annual press conference, which took place in the Kremlin on February 1, Vladimir Putin said very little about one of the most painful issues of his country: the security problems in the North Caucasus. He probably would have preferred not to... MORE

In an article that caused quite a stir, famous Russian geopolitician Alexandre Dugin maintained, “Chechnya is at the center of contemporary Russian statehood” [1]. This thought-provoking statement deserves a closer look at Dugin’s opinion of the Chechen question and his analyses of the processes underway... MORE

On January 29, Demos, the Moscow-based human rights think-tank, and the Memorial human rights group issued a joint report on the “counter-terrorist operation” in Chechnya and the North Caucasus more generally. Despite the Kremlin’s efforts to portray the region as returning to normal, “nothing has... MORE

President Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Southern Federal District, Dmitry Kozak, denied reports in the Russian press that Chechen President Alu Alkhanov will be replaced by Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov in the near future. Kommersant wrote on January 25 that Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan... MORE

On January 31, unidentified gunmen opened fire on a car carrying the mufti of Ingushetia, Isa-Khadzhi Khamkhoev, in Nazran, lightly wounding the mufti and his son, Russian and Western news agencies reported. ITAR-Tass reported on February 1 that the mufti was treated for a superficial... MORE

- CHECHEN LEGAL AID GROUP DENIED REGISTRATION On January 25, Reuters reported that the Russian government had refused for a second time to register the Moscow office of Russian Justice Initiative, a Dutch-based human rights group that gives legal aid to Chechens who have accused... MORE

Many believe that Russia’s populace supports the Kremlin’s policy toward Chechnya. It is very common to hear from Russian political scientists that Russians no longer care about the situation in the war-torn region. Indeed, it is hard to imagine an ordinary Russian thinking every day... MORE

In the wake of the London poisoning of former FSB Colonel Alexander Litvinenko came unexpected reports that the alleged “terrorist mastermind” and organizer of the September 1999 apartment block bombings in Moscow and Vologodonsk that sparked the current Russian/Chechen war was still active in the... MORE