More details have emerged about the March 6 raid on the Satsita refugee camp in Ingushetia (see Chechnya Weekly, March 10). According to a March 10 article in Nezavisimaya gazeta, the raid took place when Ella Pamfilova, head of Vladimir Putin's commission on human rights,... MORE

In a sensational accusation, the head of the international medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) charged on March 10 that Russian security agencies were involved in the 2002 kidnapping of one of the charity's employees in Dagestan. "After nineteen months of pragmatism we... MORE

On March 12 the pro-Kremlin website Utro.ru published a surprisingly balanced discussion of an article appearing that same day in the Times of London about Russia's alleged involvement in last month's assassination of Zelimkhan Yandarbiev in Qatar. The British newspaper reported that, according to unnamed... MORE

The credibility of the United Nations is on the line as the international body faces pressure from the Russian Federation to remove the phrase "armed conflict" from a report on children exploited by armies, guerrillas and terrorists. The Russian delegation to the United Nations raised... MORE

An article by Svetlana Meteleva, appearing in the March 12 issue of Moskovsky komsomolets, puts individual human faces on the tragedy of children in a civil war. What she reports from her conversations with Chechen teenagers now serving prison terms for their guerrilla activities should... MORE

The coincidence seems just a bit too perfect: Precisely during the last week before Russia's March 14 presidential election, several key leaders of Aslan Maskhadov's underground separatist government were reported to have surrendered to pro-Moscow forces in Chechnya. Not all of these surrenders were immediately... MORE

At a March 11 press conference in Moscow, representatives of various religious minorities denounced heavy handed police raids on several mosques in the Russian capital that had taken place two weeks earlier. According to Agence France-Presse, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry had stated soon... MORE

Talk of "normalization" continues in Chechnya and neighboring regions, but so does the fighting and dying. Two police officers in the Stavropol province of southern Russia were killed in firefights with gunmen from the northern Caucasus last week, according to a March 15 article in... MORE

According to an Interfax report on March 17, the federal, Chechen and Ingush authorities are continuing with their plans to dismantle the remaining refugee camps in Ingushetia, and human rights activists are continuing to protest that this is a tactic to force refugees to return... MORE

Last week's designation of Sergei Abramov as the Kadyrov administration's new prime minister seems to give both Kadyrov and the Kremlin part of what they want. On the one hand, the new premier is an ethnic Russian, rather than a Chechen as Kadyrov would prefer.... MORE