On August 10, Leonid Krivonos, the acting military commandant of Chechnya, stunned the Russian public by commenting that the Russian military command in Chechnya expects rebel activity in Chechnya to increase in August and September. Krivonos mentioned the recent ambushes and bombings of Russian military... MORE

On August 10, an attempt was made on the life of Ingushetia’s Nazran district prosecutor, Girkhan Khazbiev. According to Newsru.com, a bomb went off at Khazbiev’s house in Nazran’s Oltievo municipal district at about 1 AM, Moscow time, after which he and members of his... MORE

Rebels in Dagestan carried out an operation on August 8 involving two apparently synchronized attacks, one of which killed a district prosecutor and the other narrowly missing Dagestan’s interior minister. On August 8, the Associated Press quoted Dagestani Interior Ministry spokeswoman Anzhela Martirosova as saying... MORE

Kommersant wrote on July 9 that immediately following the bombing that killed Buinaksk prosecutor Bitar Bitarov, investigators suspected that it had been carried out by Buinaksk businessmen who manufactured plastic tubing, against whom Bitarov had launched a criminal case for tax evasion. According to the... MORE

A series of explosions in Chechnya on August 6 partially destroyed six cell phone relay stations. On August 7, RIA Novosti quoted sources in Chechnya’s Interior Ministry as saying that bombs had simultaneously exploded at five relay stations that belonged to the Russian mobile phone... MORE

On August 9, Reuters quoted former inmates of a detention center in the Chechen capital as saying that beatings with bottles, sleep deprivation and threats of violence against relatives were routine forms of torture there. The news agency cited the testimony of former prisoners of... MORE

--UMAROV MARKS ANNIVERSARY OF REBEL SEIZURE OF GROZNY In a statement posted on the separatist Chechenpress website on August 6, Chechen rebel president Dokku Umarov commemorated the rebel operation to retake Grozny conducted ten years earlier. Umarov called the August 6, 1996 rebel operation “a... MORE

On August 8, Rossiiskaya gazeta published an excerpt from a decree signed by the Russian President on August 2. In the decree, Putin instructs the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry “to submit by December 15, 2006, in accordance with the established procedure, proposals to... MORE

Russian and Chechen officials alike continued to discuss the offer of amnesty that the federal authorities offered to the rebels in Chechnya and the North Caucasus in the wake of the death of Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basaev. On August 1, Interfax reported that President... MORE

Indeed, like Memorial’s Orlov, other observers questioned the effectiveness of the federal authorities’ offer of amnesty to the rebels in Chechnya and elsewhere in the North Caucasus. On August 1, Kommersant quoted unnamed siloviki as saying that the Patrushev amnesty had thus far failed. “Only... MORE