Though the Kremlin's official line continues to be an unwavering refusal to negotiate with Aslan Maskhadov, Akhmad Kadyrov's son and the head of his security service said some surprisingly pleasant things last week about Chechnya's underground separatist president. According to a March 23 article by... MORE

Akhmad Kadyrov, who also continues to seek a role in shaping nationwide policies far beyond the borders of Chechnya, appealed on March 26 for the creation of a single, integrated administrative structure for all the Islamic clergy in the Russian Federation. Such a structure would... MORE

In what may be the final push to close the last remaining camps for refugees in Ingushetia, the Kadyrov administration's security agencies have apparently blocked off the Sputnik and Satsita camps on the outskirts of the village of Ordzhonikidzevskaya near the Chechen-Ingush border. According to... MORE

The Presidium of Russia's Supreme Court has upheld the ten-year prison sentence received by Yury Budanov, the Russian tank officer convicted last year of killing an 18-year-old Chechen woman. According to a March 29 report from Interfax, Budanov's attorney was officially informed last week that... MORE

President Vladimir Putin declared in Sochi on March 25 that "the peaceful processes now underway in Chechnya are irreversible." On that same day, according to a March 29 report by Mainat Abdullaeva in Novaya gazeta, ten pro-Moscow servicemen were killed in Chechnya and another ten... MORE

Russia's leading independent pollster, Yury Levada, has found that despite the Russian media's increasingly monolithic line on Chechnya, willingness among ordinary Russians to accept independence for the southern republic has been slowly growing--from 8 percent in February to 11 percent in March. As reported in... MORE

It was on Moscow's celebrated Pushkin Square, some thirty-six years ago, that one of the landmark protests of the Brezhnev era took place as a handful of brave dissidents unfurled signs denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The demonstrators were immediately arrested, but many remember... MORE

--GENERAL ADMITS CONTINUING DIFFICULTIES Less than two weeks after Putin's triumphant reelection, a key Russian general in effect admitted that the military situation in Chechnya is not nearly as hopeful as the Russian electorate has been told. General Vyacheslav Tikhomirov, head of the internal forces... MORE

According to an Interfax report on March 17, the federal, Chechen and Ingush authorities are continuing with their plans to dismantle the remaining refugee camps in Ingushetia, and human rights activists are continuing to protest that this is a tactic to force refugees to return... MORE

Last week's designation of Sergei Abramov as the Kadyrov administration's new prime minister seems to give both Kadyrov and the Kremlin part of what they want. On the one hand, the new premier is an ethnic Russian, rather than a Chechen as Kadyrov would prefer.... MORE