Was Akhmad Kadyrov a casualty of poor planning and purchasing decisions in the Russian military? An article by Viktor Myasnikov in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on May 21 argued that the federal armed services' failure to buy modern metal detectors is what made it impossible for Kadyrov's... MORE

Mikhail Trepashkin, the dissident ex-FSB lawyer who tried to investigate his former employer's links to the 1999 apartment bombings that gave Vladimir Putin his justification for the second Chechen war, received a four-year prison sentence on May 19 for revealing state secrets and for illegally... MORE

Election authorities in Chechnya have now scheduled the special election to fill the republic's vacant presidency for August 29 - a week earlier than the latest date possible under the constitution which went into force last year. According to RIA Novosti, the decision was confirmed... MORE

Much of the punditry about the race to fill the pro-Moscow administration's vacant presidency has assumed that the Kremlin will continue its policy of favoring a single strong leader in Chechnya - backing that leader's near-total control over the parliament, the local district administrations, and... MORE

-- THE PROS AND CONS OF STRONGMAN RULE IN CHECHNYA "In the economic context Russia has no interest in seeing the emergence in Chechnya of a strong new leader [who would embezzle still more federal subsidies], but on the level of politics some such figure... MORE

Georgia's new government under President Mikheil Saakashvili may be tilting toward Russia on Chechnya-related issues in order to win concessions in other areas. In early May, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights sent an open letter to Saakashvili expressing concern over two Chechens living... MORE

By putting German Gref - head of the federal Ministry for Economic Development and Trade - in charge of Chechnya's economic restoration, Putin is raising expectations that will be difficult to meet. Gref flew to Chechnya on May 15, accompanied by a high-powered delegation that... MORE

President Putin has ordered that the directorate for reconstruction work in Chechnya is to be transferred from Moscow to Grozny. The new head of the directorate is to be one Batukhan Kurbanov, an engineer who was involved in earlier clean-up efforts in the shattered Chechen... MORE

A week after the Kadyrov assassination, terrorist warlord Shamil Basaev claimed responsibility for it. During the night of May 16-17, the extremist rebel website Kavkaz-center published what it said was an e-mail from Basaev declaring that his forces had carried out a death sentence issued... MORE

Chechnya's special election to fill the pro-Moscow administration's newly vacant presidency is now set for September 5, and the Putin administration is weighing its options. According to an analysis by Zoya Svetova in the May 17 issue of Russky Kurier, the Kremlin has yet to... MORE