In a sensational accusation, the head of the international medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) charged on March 10 that Russian security agencies were involved in the 2002 kidnapping of one of the charity's employees in Dagestan. "After nineteen months of pragmatism we... MORE

On March 12 the pro-Kremlin website Utro.ru published a surprisingly balanced discussion of an article appearing that same day in the Times of London about Russia's alleged involvement in last month's assassination of Zelimkhan Yandarbiev in Qatar. The British newspaper reported that, according to unnamed... MORE

The credibility of the United Nations is on the line as the international body faces pressure from the Russian Federation to remove the phrase "armed conflict" from a report on children exploited by armies, guerrillas and terrorists. The Russian delegation to the United Nations raised... MORE

An article by Svetlana Meteleva, appearing in the March 12 issue of Moskovsky komsomolets, puts individual human faces on the tragedy of children in a civil war. What she reports from her conversations with Chechen teenagers now serving prison terms for their guerrilla activities should... MORE

The coincidence seems just a bit too perfect: Precisely during the last week before Russia's March 14 presidential election, several key leaders of Aslan Maskhadov's underground separatist government were reported to have surrendered to pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya. Not all of these surrenders were immediately... MORE

At a March 11 press conference in Moscow, representatives of various religious minorities denounced heavy handed police raids on several mosques in the Russian capital that had taken place two weeks earlier. According to Agence France-Presse, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry had stated soon... MORE

Talk of "normalization" continues in Chechnya and neighboring regions, but so does the fighting and dying. Two police officers in the Stavropol province of southern Russia were killed in firefights with gunmen from the northern Caucasus last week, according to a March 15 article in... MORE

Pro-Moscow security agencies in Chechnya won a major victory on March 7 with the surrender of Magomed Khambiev, minister of defense in the underground separatist government of Aslan Maskhadov. Many, though not all, reports of this event in the Russian media have failed to mention... MORE

With Russian President Vladimir Putin's expected reelection triumph just days away--and looking more and more like the October 2003 pseudo-election of Akhmad Kadyrov--the Russian authorities are further intensifying their pressure on Chechen refugees. In a March 6 article for Prague Watchdog, Ruslan Isaev reported that... MORE

Vague reports in the western media about Islamic militants leaving Chechnya to fight against U.S. troops and their allies in Iraq--supposedly under the command of the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi--continue to receive scornful comment from well informed experts. Historian Brian Williams of the University... MORE