On February 1, Vladimir Kalamanov, the Russian presidential special human rights representative for Chechnya, called for a "return" of the ethnic Russian and Russian-language populace to Chechnya. "The [Russian] state," Kalamanov said, "owes an enormous debt to the Russian refugees, 200,000 persons, who left Chechnya... MORE

On January 30, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Vladimir Rushailo, completed an official visit to Georgia. During his meeting with President Eduard Shevardnadze, it was agreed that "in the near future a delegation of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations will come to... MORE

Is there a plan afoot to recombine Chechnya and Ingushetia into a single republic? The former president of Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, who is now a member of the Russian Federation Council, "expressed himself categorically against the idea of the deputy of the State Duma Aslambek... MORE

Writing on January 30 for the website of the pro-Moscow Chechen administration, Kavkaz.strana.ru, Kheda Khasmagomedova reported that "child mortality in Chechnya remains high--according to various estimates it stands at about 35 percent." It would be even higher, she observed, were it not for "the enormous... MORE

In an interview summarized in the February 1 issue of the New York Times, oligarch-in-exile Boris Berezovsky underscored that "he was just weeks away from laying out documentary evidence that Russia's security services were involved in apartment-house explosions in September 1999 that killed 300 people"... MORE

In "A Stable but Tense Chechnya," an article appearing in the January 26 issue of Novoe Voennoe Obozrenie, military journalist Mikhail Khodarenok, a leading "hawk" on the subject of the war in Chechnya, describes the current situation in the republic as offering grounds for cautious... MORE

The newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported on February 11 that, on the previous day, its award-winning war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya had been taken into custody while she was covering a mopping up operation being conducted in Shatoi District. According to one account, she was taken to... MORE

On February 8, the Russian presidential spokesman for issues relating to Chechnya, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, observed during a Moscow press conference that the counterterrorist operation in Chechnya would have been completed a long time ago had not a part of the Chechen populace been aiding the... MORE

On February 7, the Russian website SMI.ru published a lengthy summary of the recent testimony of CIA director George Tenet before the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee. Tenet's words concerning the conflict in Chechnya were cited, strangely, in the original English: "Putin," Tenet reported to... MORE