Nezavisimaya gazeta's Andrei Riskin has also expressed skepticism about the prospects for a successful amnesty. On April 21 he reported that, according the public prosecutor's office, military servicemen of the federal government or of the local Kadyrov administration are suspects in 300 of the 500... MORE

The Kadyrov administration's deputy prime minister for the security agencies, Movsar Khamidov, who had already confirmed the estimate in a leaked report that forty-nine unmarked mass graves have been found in Chechnya (see Chechnya Weekly, April 15), has now added another telling detail. Khamidov is... MORE

Underscoring another of the tragic dilemmas created by the Chechen wars, some leaders of the ethnic Chechen community in Moscow are calling for special measures to attract back to the republic the ethnic Russians who fled the violence that was committed by both sides in... MORE

In an April 21 telephone conversation with Jamestown, the U.S. Central Command refused to confirm or deny reports in the British press that Chechens had been captured by American troops in Iraq. Tales of Chechens in Iraq are beginning to seem almost like an "urban... MORE

"Neither side yet wants a genuine, mutual absolution of wartime sins." That is the verdict of Anna Politkovskaya, who predicted in an April 21 article for "Novaya gazeta" that the forthcoming amnesty in Chechnya will take into account the interests of only one side--and that... MORE

Two unpleasant but important truths were confirmed on April 20, when a pro-separatist website broadcast a video documenting a successful April 15 attack on a bus near Grozny. The first of these truths--and one that is no surprise to knowledgeable observers--is that the Moscow-appointed Kadyrov... MORE

Was the April 17 murder of the prominent Russian reformist legislator, Sergei Yushenkov, connected with his opposition to the Putin administration's war on Chechnya? Perhaps some deathbed confession or leak from secret archives will provide a definitive answer to that question many years from now.... MORE

By Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University On April 5 a panel of specialists discussed the situation in Chechnya at the annual conference of the Association for Study of Nationalities at Columbia University in New York City. The panel was chaired by the Hoover Institution's John Dunlop... MORE

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights--which this year is chaired by the delegation from Libya--on April 16 defeated a resolution criticizing the Russian government for its policies in Chechnya. The vote was 15 in favor, 21 opposed, and 17 abstentions. The defeated resolution was... MORE

One of the crowd-pleasing gestures made by the Russian authorities just prior to the March 23 constitutional referendum was the announcement that they would begin reducing the number of checkpoints along Chechnya's main highways and intersections. It is widely agreed by both pro-Moscow and anti-Moscow... MORE