former high-level advisor to President Yeltsin, Leonid Smirnyagin, who is currently an associate at the Carnegie Center in Moscow, recently observed that the proximity of the small autonomous republic of Ingushetia to Chechnya and the fact that it contains a large number of internally displaced... MORE

In a development with enormous implications for the Chechen conflict and the fate of Chechen internally displaced persons, retired FSB General Murat Zyazikov was announced as the winner of Ingushetia's presidential election, held on April 28. Zyazikov was reported to have received 52 percent of... MORE

On April 26, Russian state-run television (RTR) broadcast footage of a dead body identified as that of a top separatist guerilla commander, the Arab-born Khattab. If the body turned out to be that of Khattab, then he would become "the most important guerilla commander killed... MORE

On April 28, retired Army General Aleksandr Lebed, the elected governor of Krasnoyarsk Krai and the oft-maligned architect of the 1996 Khasavyurt Accords, which had put an end to the first Russo-Chechen war, died as a result of severe injuries sustained in an MI-8 helicopter... MORE

On April 25, the Russian website Kolokol.ru summarized the contents of an article that had appeared in the official government newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta. In an act of protest, eleven Russian policemen from Tula have demonstratively quit their posts in the Nozhai-Yurt district of Chechnya and... MORE

In an article appearing in the April 23 issue of the Los Angeles Times, journalist Maura Reynolds wrote that "less than two weeks after announcing new safeguards to prevent abuses, the Russian military launched a large-scale operation in Chechnya that was marked by beatings, looting,... MORE

On April 25, the Associated Press reported that, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) "approximately 4,000 Chechen children have been maimed or killed by mines since the first war erupted in the republic in 1994." In all, 7,000 to 10,000 people are said... MORE

The no. 23 (April 19) issue of Dispatches from Chechnya, which is distributed by the human rights organization Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe, described the current situation in the Chechen capital. "According to various data," the report observed, "there are from 250,000 to 300,000... MORE

The online daily Gazeta.ru wrote on April 25 that work on a new constitution for the Chechen Republic is nearing its end. "Akhmad Kadyrov, the head of the Moscow-installed republican administration, has appointed himself to the key position in charge of a new ad hoc... MORE