.On April 7, elections were held for the post of the next president of Ingushetia. Because there are some 150,000 Chechen IDPs (internally displaced persons) currently living on the territory of this small autonomous republic, whoever becomes the next Ingush president must necessarily play a... MORE

On March 27, the commander of the Combined Group of Russian Forces in Chechnya, Lieutenant General Vladimir Moltenskoi, signed a special order, Order No. 80, stipulating new rules for the conducting of special operations within population points of the Chechen Republic. The specific aim of... MORE

Recent developments on controlling zachistki may well have been connected with the meetings of the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Council of Europe taking place at the time in the Tauride Palace in Petersburg. On March 29, the online daily... MORE

On March 26, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov declared to reporters in Petersburg that there was no possibility whatsoever of creating an international tribunal for Chechnya at The Hague. "All the talk about this topic is a provocation by those who would like to complicate... MORE

On March 25, the French Foreign Ministry confirmed that the French ambassador to Moscow, Claude Blanchemaison, had, on March 15, been summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow and informed of the displeasure of the Russian government over the fact that a seminar, entitled... MORE

On March 26, it was reported that the Russian Foreign Ministry had sent a note to the Georgian Embassy in Moscow demanding the immediate arrest and extradition to Russia of Chechen field commander Ruslan Gelaev "for immediate prosecution" (Interfax, March 26). The Georgian embassy in... MORE

On March 29, the pro-Moscow prime minister of Chechnya, Stanislav Il'yasov, announced that "all [refugee] tent camps in the Chechen republic" are to be liquidated before April 15 of this year. In his words, virtually everything has now been readied to move this populace to... MORE

On March 26, the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, told reporters in Petersburg that his agency possessed additional information concerning the involvement of oligarch Boris Berezovsky in the funding of illegal armed formations in Chechnya. "We have received even more information than we had... MORE

Over the past week and a half, there have been indications that federal funds intended for the restoration of Chechnya have, as before, been disappearing into a bottomless "black hole." On March 22, the Associated Press reported that Russian Audit Chamber chair Sergei Stepashin had... MORE