As political life in Moscow revives with the end of the December-January holiday season, a leading topic of discussion among Chechnya-watchers is Kadyrov's surprise appointment of Umar Dzhabrailov as one of the republic's representatives in the upper house of the federal parliament (see Chechnya Weekly,... MORE

Dissident Russian lawyer and former KGB/FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin has been transferred to a prison cell with more normal living conditions. But a Moscow military court has rejected his defense counsel's petition to drop the criminal case against him. According to the website Prava cheloveka... MORE

If Vladimir Putin does not make major changes in his Chechnya policies after his expected reelection in March, many political pundits will be embarrassed. Among them is Aleksei Malashenko of the Moscow Carnegie Center. In a recent interview with Maksim Shevchenko of the journal Smysl... MORE

The revival of an official hunting season in Chechnya--it will take place for the first time in nine years--will almost certainly be used by the pro-Putin and pro-Kadyrov media as another sign that life there is returning to "normal." But a close reading of Musa... MORE

Many observers have noted that Chechnya's traditionally flexible, syncretistic approach to its Islamic heritage is suffering inroads from extremists as the war hardens attitudes. Apparently this is now happening not only among the separatist rebels, for whom Islam provides an obvious source of anti-Russian symbols... MORE

Whatever disagreements there may be either within Russia or abroad about the political future of Chechnya, one would hope that all could agree on protecting civilian refugees, including women and children, from being forced against their will to return to a shattered, crime-ridden war zone.... MORE

How many servicemen in the Kadyrov administration's security agencies are double agents--that is, separatist rebels operating under cover? A January 14 article by Yelena Shesternina in Russky kurier suggested that the recent arrest of a 26-year-old policeman in Grozny represents just the tip of a... MORE

John Dunlop, senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and former editor of Chechnya Weekly, has written the most detailed analysis yet to appear publicly in English (or any other language) of the October 2002 hostage crisis at Moscow's Dubrovka theater. His thirty-five-page text was... MORE

As this issue of Chechnya Weekly goes to press, attendees at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival in Utah are discussing the world debut there of a new documentary film entitled "Disbelief," directed by Andrei Nekrasov. The festival's catalogue describes the film as "deploying all the... MORE

Dissident lawyer and former KGB/FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin, jailed after he raised questions about the 1999 apartment bombings and the 2002 tragedy at the Dubrovka theater, apparently took few precautions against possible countermeasures by his former colleagues. According to a January 14 article in the... MORE