...ARSANOV'S EMERGENCE RAISES QUESTIONS While Maigov's position is now more or less clear, another recently self-announced Chechen peacemaker in Moscow seems to occupy a more dubious status. Vakha Arsanov, former vice president of the separatist government, has resurfaced for the first time since 1999. He... MORE

Monday, February 24, was a day off across Russia in celebration of armed forces day, which this year fell on a Sunday. In a country that has long had compulsory military service for (in theory) all males, February 23 serves as a de facto "Father's... MORE

The Moscow weekly Novoye vremya (New Time) recently published a strikingly candid interview with Ruslan Aushev, former president of Ingushetia and now head of the committee for veterans' affairs of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Referring to Aslan Maskhadov as "the legally elected president" of... MORE

--KREMLIN ADMITS CONSTITUTION FLAWED. The Putin administration's in-house human rights advisers admit that its proposed constitution for Chechnya has serious flaws. Human-rights ombudsman Oleg Mironov told Radio Liberty on February 4 that the proposed text gives the president of the Chechen republic too much power... MORE

How many Russian soldiers have died in the current Chechen war? Russian officials issued dramatically conflicting accounts on February 17, with the Defense Ministry in Moscow contradicting figures released earlier in the day by the military headquarters for the Northern Caucasus. In a chilling example... MORE

It would appear that separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov now has a new representative in Moscow. At least, Salambek Maigov's claim to have been appointed to that position on February 3 has not been directly contradicted by any authoritative spokesman for Maskhadov since Maigov's Moscow press... MORE

Did President Jacques Chirac of France endorse the Kremlin's March 23 constitutional referendum during Vladimir Putin's recent visit to Paris? No, but the pro-Putin Russian media are trying to create the impression that he did--and Chirac's apparently deliberate vagueness on the issue is lending itself... MORE

In another major victory for its policies in Chechnya, the Putin administration has now persuaded the human-rights commissioner for the Council of Europe to endorse its controversial referendum to ratify a new constitution for the republic. Alvaro Gil-Robles even embraced the date of March 23,... MORE

Kadyrov's concession to Gil-Robles "changes nothing," dissident member of the Russian parliament Sergei Kovalev told Jamestown in a February 13 telephone interview. He said that if one accepted the official figures from last autumn's Moscow-controlled census in Chechnya, one would have to believe that since... MORE

Matthew Evangelista, The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? Brookings Institution Press, Washington, 2002. The key to Matthew Evangelista's new book on Chechnya is its subtitle. The author, a professor of government at Cornell University, offers one of the few... MORE