The Presidium of Russia's Supreme Court has upheld the ten-year prison sentence received by Yury Budanov, the Russian tank officer convicted last year of killing an 18-year-old Chechen woman. According to a March 29 report from Interfax, Budanov's attorney was officially informed last week that... MORE

President Vladimir Putin declared in Sochi on March 25 that "the peaceful processes now underway in Chechnya are irreversible." On that same day, according to a March 29 report by Mainat Abdullaeva in Novaya gazeta, ten pro-Moscow servicemen were killed in Chechnya and another ten... MORE

Russia's leading independent pollster, Yury Levada, has found that despite the Russian media's increasingly monolithic line on Chechnya, willingness among ordinary Russians to accept independence for the southern republic has been slowly growing--from 8 percent in February to 11 percent in March. As reported in... MORE

It was on Moscow's celebrated Pushkin Square, some thirty-six years ago, that one of the landmark protests of the Brezhnev era took place as a handful of brave dissidents unfurled signs denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The demonstrators were immediately arrested, but many remember... MORE

The noose closed tighter on Chechen refugees on April 1 with the closing of the Sputnik tent camp. That leaves only the nearby Satsita camp as the last one in Ingushetia still functioning--and the Russian authorities want to close that camp as well. The Interfax... MORE

The Dubrovka hostage crisis of October 2002 is back in the news, in Russia and also in Germany, where state prosecutors are investigating evidence that the terrorists who planned that terrorist raid on a Moscow theater may have included a group of Chechens living temporarily... MORE

Last week the federal Duma gave preliminary approval to a controversial bill that would limit the rights of Russians to organize street demonstrations such as those that have taken place to protest the Putin administration's policies in Chechnya. Grigory Yavlinsky, head of the opposition Yabloko... MORE

As this issue of Chechnya Weekly goes to press, the authorities in Qatar are still proceeding with plans to try two Russian intelligence officers accused of assassinating the Chechen extremist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiev (see Chechnya Weekly, March 24). One of the defense lawyers for the... MORE

Contrary to the reassuring news that most Russians are receiving via the state television networks--now tightly controlled by the Putin administration--the arrival of spring has brought a sharp increase in the activity of Chechnya's separatist guerrillas. A March 30 article by Ivan Smirnov on the... MORE

On the wall of a crowded bus shelter in Grozny, surrounded by other handwritten announcements, is posted the following: "I can get you a passport for foreign travel. Contact Aminat at…" Two women who have just read that advertisement are discussing it. One says, "If... MORE