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

On March 26, the mass circulation newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, in an unusual development, published lengthy excerpts from an open letter sent to the "leadership of the country and of the Ministry of Internal Affairs" by members of SOBR UPOP--an elite anti-organized crime MVD spetznaz unit--from... MORE

On April 2, the North Caucasus Directorate of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office disclosed the names of several Russian citizens who had fought in Afghanistan on the Taliban side and were being kept at the Guantanamo U.S. military base in Cuba. Two of the captives,... MORE

On April 1, Interfax reported that the head of the pro-Moscow interim Chechen administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, had become a victim of arbitrariness on the part of Russian federal troops stationed in Gudermes District in Chechnya. "Kadyrov's spokesman Lecha Yakhyaev," Interfax related, "told the press that... MORE

On April 3, the U.S.-supported Radio Liberty began broadcasting to Russia in the Chechen language. The decision to commence Chechen broadcasting, pushed through by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, had been adopted last year by the U.S. Congress. "Inhabitants of the North Caucasus," the... MORE

In what appeared to be a clear violation of instructions issued last week by Lieutenant General Vladimir Moltenskoi, commander of the Combined Group of Russian Forces in Chechnya, some 300 Chechen civilians were detained during a search operation conducted in the village of Tsotsin-Yurt between... MORE