Some 145 members of the European parliament--that is, nearly one-fourth of the body's total membership--have signed a statement supporting a temporary administration of Chechnya by the United Nations. The UN administration would serve as a transition to a full-fledged peace, as proposed by the foreign... MORE

The phenomenon of women suicide bombers is one of the most poorly understood of the current Chechen war--mainly because it is such a genuine novelty. Male Chechen guerrillas stand in a long tradition of armed resistance and rebellion in the Caucasus, a tradition that the... MORE

What awaits the refugees now living in Ingushetia if the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin succeeds in its stated goal of getting all of them to return to Chechnya by March? Anna Politkovskaya reported in the February 16 issue of Novaya gazeta on her... MORE

Since the February 6 Moscow subway bombing, the Putin administration has dug in its heels against the very idea of negotiating with the Maskhadov government. Putin declared on the day of the attack that “it’s not the first time that we encounter a synchronization of... MORE

Akhmad Kadyrov continues to pursue the transfer of command authority from the Russian military to himself. According to a February 17 article by Vladlen Maksimov in Novye izvestia, Kadyrov told a Grozny press conference the previous day that leadership of the “anti-terrorist operation” in the... MORE

Was it the Russian secret services who assassinated the former acting president of Chechnya’s separatist government in his Persian Gulf refuge, or his former allies in the separatist movement? Each side blames the other for the February 13 murder of Zelimkhan Yandarbiev in Qatar. As... MORE

Some would like to dismiss Anna Politkovskaya’s hard hitting reports from Chechnya as merely anecdotal rather than statistical. But for obvious reasons we have no rigorous, reliable statistics about state-sponsored kidnappings and other atrocities. The conclusions of this veteran correspondent for Novaya gazeta are based... MORE

Chechnya Weekly readers whose primary language is Russian—or who at least read Russian better than English—will be interested to know that John Dunlop’s long, provocative analysis of the October 2002 Dubrovka tragedy (see Chechnya Weekly, January 21) is now available on-line in that language. For... MORE

Akhmad Kadyrov for the first time confirmed publicly on February 16 what many Chechnya-watchers already had considered obvious: Anatoly Popov will not be returning to his post as the Kadyrov administration's prime minister. According to a February 17 article on the Gazeta.ru website, Kadyrov revealed... MORE

Muradov also spoke skeptically of reports in some American media last week that as many as 2,000 separatist guerrillas might leave Chechnya in the near future to fight U.S. forces in Iraq. The only fighters who might possibly leave Chechnya to wage war elsewhere, he... MORE