On January 9, the heads of two large districts of Chechnya lying north of the Terek River submitted a note to the republic's acting chief of administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, in which they affirmed that they were being forced to resign their positions due to a... MORE

On January 22, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that Russia was switching the command of the "antiterrorist" operation in Chechnya from the military to the Federal Security Service (FSB). The director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, Putin announced, would henceforth be in charge of... MORE

On January 11, the new chairman-in-office of the fifty-five-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Dan Geoana, pledged during a visit to Vienna to make Chechnya and the Balkans his key priorities during Bucharest's twelve months in charge of... MORE

The January 18 issue of the weekly Obshchaya gazeta carried an informative report by journalist Bakhtiyar Akhmedkhanov, who recently spent time with both the Russian military and the Chechen separatists in Chechnya. A Russian officer told the journalist that even if the federal forces succeeded... MORE

The January 15 issue of the weekly Novaya gazeta featured a piece by a well-known journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, devoted to the recent kidnapping in Chechnya of American citizen Kenneth Gluck, head of the North Caucasus mission of Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF-Doctors without Borders). Villages like... MORE

On January 14-17, two monitors of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Lord Frank Judd of Britain and Rudolf Bindig of Germany, visited the North Caucasus region and the Republic of Chechnya. They were in Chechnya proper from January 15-17. While in Chechnya,... MORE

On January 25, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted 88-20 (with 11 abstentions) to restore Russia's voting rights in the Council. Russia had been the first country to lose its voting rights over the half-century existence of the forty-three-nation assembly (Agence... MORE

Spokesmen for the Russian leadership have begun making a great deal out of the supposed fact that Aslan Maskhadov's powers as Chechen president were to expire at the end of January 2001. Thus journalist Timofei Borisov wrote in the government newspaper Rossiiskaya gazeta: "De facto... MORE