In an interview with Novaya Gazeta (no. 12, 2001), the newly appointed prime minister of Chechnya, Stanislav Il'yasov, made some unusually sympathetic comments about the sufferings of the Chechen populace. "The main thing," he observed, "is that if we say that it is time to... MORE

The Los Angeles Times (February 26) has reported that the bodies of dozens of Chechens, most of them men, were found on February 24 in a dumping site close to the large Russian military base at Khankala, near the Chechen capital of Djohar (Grozny). The... MORE

Is Doku Zavgaev making yet another political comeback? The former Communist Party first secretary of Checheno-Ingushetia under Mikhail Gorbachev, who was subsequently restored to power by Yeltsin in 1995, recently flew from Tanzania--where he serves as Russian ambassador--to Moscow in order to hold a heavily... MORE

It was announced on February 22 that the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, Alvaro Gil-Robles, will pay an official visit to Russia from February 26 to March 2, following a request by the Council's Committee of Ministers. On February 27 and 28, Gil-Robles... MORE

On the subject of Colonel Budanov, who is scheduled to go on trial on February 28 for having strangled a young Chechen woman, General Gennady Troshev, commander of the North Caucasus Military District, recently recalled: "I met him several times. Budanov struck me as an... MORE

The Federal Security Service's (FSB) February 20 detention of an award-winning Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who had been covering the war in Chechnya for the pro-democracy weekly Novaya Gazeta, has generated a great deal of publicity in Russia. The background to her three-day detention was... MORE

The February 15 issue of the Russian emigre weekly Russkaya mysl', which is published in Paris, carried an article entitled "The Children of Chechnya," reporting on a press conference held at the Central House of Journalists in Moscow on February 7. The theme of the... MORE

On February 12, the chairman of the Russian Accounting Chamber (the rough equivalent of the U.S. General Accounting Office), former Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, stated publicly that the cost of the war in Chechnya had been so great that the money spent on it could... MORE

The pro-Moscow government of Chechnya is slowly being formed. A major reason for the slowness of this process is that the names of future ministers have to be agreed upon by the chief of administration, Akhmad Kadyrov; the premier, Stanislav Il'yasov; and the plenipotentiary representative... MORE