On June 24, the trial in a military court in Rostov-on-Don of Colonel Yury Budanov, charged with strangling a young Chechen woman in March of 2000, recessed until July 1 (Strana.ru, June 24). The state prosecutor in the case, Sergei Nazarov, had on June 18... MORE

Writing in the no. 42 (June 17) issue of Novaya Gazeta, award-winning Russian war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya reported on the recent forced resignation of Colonel General Mikhail Kislitsyn, chief military procurator of Russia. Kislitsyn's resignation, she wrote, occurred after a telephone call from Russian Procurator... MORE

On June 25, in a trial conducted with the accused being in absentia, the Narofominsk Military Court in Moscow found former FSB Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Litvinenko guilty of abuse of office and "the illegal acquisition of explosives" and handed him a three-and-a-half year suspended sentence... MORE

The June 21 issue of the Washington Post carried an outline for a proposed peace settlement for the conflict in Chechnya written by three former high-ranking U.S. officials, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander M. Haig Jr. and Max Kampelman. The three former officials head up the American... MORE

DisasterRelief.org reported on June 26 that, "At least seventy-two people are reported dead and 86,000 are homeless after severe flooding earlier this week in parts of Chechnya and Russia's North Caucasus region.... Residents say they are the worst [floods] in Chechnya since 1937."

On June 21 Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov sent a letter to President Putin, apparently by email, asking him to resume negotiations toward a peace settlement (Prima News Service, June 25). Several days later, sources in the Kremlin "confirmed that Vladimir Putin had received Maskhadov's... MORE

There is mounting evidence that Russian forces in Chechnya increasingly find themselves at war with young Chechen adolescents. In an interview in the July 1 issue of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, a former high-ranking Russian official, Ivan Rybkin, sought to explain what had induced him to publish... MORE

During a visit to Chechnya to investigate recent "cleansing operations" conducted in the villages of Mesker-Yurt (in May) and Chechen-Aul (in June), the well-known Russian war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya also touched upon the theme of children. She talked with a Chechen mother whose eight-year-old son,... MORE

In her article, Politkovskaya noted, almost in passing, that the Russian forces in Chechnya have revived an ancient and cruel form of torture and execution: crucifixion. "They wanted to crucify Sharpuddi," she wrote, "as they had done with another man before him, by nailing him... MORE