--CONTROVERSIAL FILM NIXED A film festival in Chicago has unexpectedly canceled plans to include Russian director Andrei Nekrasov's documentary about the 1999 apartment bombings that helped Vladimir Putin justify the second Chechen war (see Chechnya Weekly, January 21). According to an April 4 report on... MORE

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB; the renamed KGB) appears now to be using a new, stunningly self-defeating tactic to try to forestall possible terrorist attacks: kidnapping widows of Chechen men already killed by those same agencies. A handful of such widows have become suicide bombers,... MORE

By encouraging reports that Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya's underground separatist president, is about to surrender, the administration of Akhmad Kadyrov has seriously raised the stakes in its campaign to prove that peace is at hand. If Maskhadov is still at large a month from now, with... MORE

Federal forces first betrayed, then tortured and murdered separatist guerrillas in the Urus-Martan district southwest of Grozny after the guerrillas surrendered some four years ago in response to an offer of amnesty. That is the conclusion drawn by Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya gazeta from what... MORE

Rather than exhibiting "normalization," the situation for peaceful civilians in Chechnya is actually deteriorating, according to a joint statement released on April 7 by four human rights groups--three of them western and one Russian. The groups are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Medical Foundation... MORE

On April 11 began the long awaited trial of two Russian intelligence agents charged with murdering a Chechen extremist in Qatar. According to QNA, the Persian Gulf sheikhdom's state controlled news agency, both of the defendants pleaded not guilty to the major charge of murder--though... MORE

A volunteer for the international medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres ("Doctors Without Borders") was freed last weekend some 607 days after his kidnapping in Dagestan. Arjan Erkel is now safely back in his native Holland, apparently in reasonably good health but about forty pounds lighter... MORE

CORRECTION: The March 31 issue of Chechnya Weekly confused two different demonstrations in Moscow during the Brezhnev years, each of which in its own way was a milestone in the development of the dissident movement. We incorrectly wrote that "it was on Moscow's celebrated Pushkin... MORE

A Russian aircraft killed a Chechen woman and five of her children in the southern highland village of Rigakhoy, according to a report distributed on April 13 by the Russian human rights center Memorial. The woman, Marit Tsintsaeva, had tried to shelter the children in... MORE

Hints continue to emerge from the administration of Akhmad Kadyrov about the possible “voluntary surrender” of Aslan Maskhadov, the head of Chechnya’s underground separatist government. Andrei Riskin noted in the April 16 issue of Nezavisimaya gazeta that “lately not one day has gone by without... MORE