The American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC) has condemned the May 9 assassination of Akhmad Kadyrov, calling on May 10 for a renewed commitment by both parties to end the war through peace negotiations. "Yesterday's attack was reprehensible," said Glen Howard (who heads both... MORE

Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned out to be a victim of his own success in Chechnya. Having systematically removed from the political game all possible rivals to Akhmad Kadyrov - for example by forcing the strongest contenders out of last autumn's rigged presidential election... MORE

Chechenpress, one of the organs of Chechnya's underground separatist government, published the following statement from President Aslan Maskhadov on May 10: "In connection with the terrorist act at the Dynamo stadium in Johar [Grozny], in which peaceful citizens of the ChRI [the Chechen Republic of... MORE

From the beginning of the year 2004 until the end of April, some 136 people were kidnapped in Chechnya, Dmitry Grushkin of the human rights center Memorial told Radio Liberty in a broadcast interview last week. Of these, seventy-six were eventually released while thirteen were... MORE

It appears that both federal troops and Akhmad Kadyrov's forces failed in a special, intensive push to capture Aslan Maskhadov as a trophy for Vladimir Putin's second inauguration. If they had succeeded, Kadyrov and Putin would have been able to boast the greatest victory against... MORE

Now that the Putin administration has largely neutralized opposition in the parliament and the broadcast news media, the next logical step is to cripple - or at least discredit - Russia's most independent-minded human rights organizations. That would seem to be the reasoning behind a... MORE

Georgia's new government under President Mikheil Saakashvili may be tilting toward Russia on Chechnya-related issues in order to win concessions in other areas. In early May, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights sent an open letter to Saakashvili expressing concern over two Chechens living... MORE

By putting German Gref - head of the federal Ministry for Economic Development and Trade - in charge of Chechnya's economic restoration, Putin is raising expectations that will be difficult to meet. Gref flew to Chechnya on May 15, accompanied by a high-powered delegation that... MORE

President Putin has ordered that the directorate for reconstruction work in Chechnya is to be transferred from Moscow to Grozny. The new head of the directorate is to be one Batukhan Kurbanov, an engineer who was involved in earlier clean-up efforts in the shattered Chechen... MORE

A week after the Kadyrov assassination, terrorist warlord Shamil Basaev claimed responsibility for it. During the night of May 16-17, the extremist rebel website Kavkaz-center published what it said was an e-mail from Basaev declaring that his forces had carried out a death sentence issued... MORE