Is the U.S. government working behind the scenes to help spring from jail two Russian spies accused of assassinating a Chechen extremist? Did the assassination break a deal that Russia had just made for the extremist to be tried in Qatar? Did the Russian hit-men... MORE

Once again we are seeing vague reports in the mainstream media about "Chechens" having been captured among al Qaeda terrorists, this time in northwestern Pakistan. But as this issue of Chechnya Weekly goes to press, not one of the gunmen captured or killed by Pakistani... MORE

As expected, a local municipal court in Moscow has fined Lev Ponomarev, director of the For Human Rights movement, for organizing an unsanctioned demonstration last month to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Stalinist deportation of the Chechen people to Central Asia. In the meantime... MORE

Is the Russian Federation quietly getting other former Soviet republics to agree not to admit migrants from Chechnya? Anna Politkovskaya described in the March 22 issue of Novaya gazeta the case of a Chechen woman who has lived for some years in Ingushetia. When the... MORE

Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has solidified his power--if not his legitimacy--with his stage managed reelection, he has the opportunity to make some fundamental changes in his Chechnya policies. An early test of Putin's commitment to Akhmad Kadyrov will involve the struggle between the... MORE

Aslan Doukaev, director of the North Caucasus service of Radio Liberty, has provided some revealing observations about Chechens' current reading habits in an interview published in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy. Lively discussions of Chechnya's history and cultural identity are taking place among the... MORE

--KIDNAPPINGS ARE HIGHLIGHTED From the beginning of January through mid-March at least sixty-three Chechen civilians have been kidnapped, according to the Moscow-based human rights center Memorial. Of that total, twenty-six have since been released and two have been found dead. The fate of another thirty-five... MORE

The March 3 issue of Chechnya Weekly mistakenly referred to our contributor Zaindi Choltaev as "a former official of the separatist Maskhadov government." In fact, Mr. Choltaev never served under Aslan Maskhadov, who was elected as Chechnya's president in 1997. By that time Mr. Choltaev... MORE

Chechnya has now had four events described as "elections" since March of 2003, and each one has been more brazenly fraudulent than the one before it. In the March 14 election for the presidency of the Russian Federation, the authorities barely tried to provide any... MORE

More details have emerged about the March 6 raid on the Satsita refugee camp in Ingushetia (see Chechnya Weekly, March 10). According to a March 10 article in Nezavisimaya gazeta, the raid took place when Ella Pamfilova, head of Vladimir Putin's commission on human rights,... MORE