It was not until Friday, August 27—three days after the crashes of two Russian passenger jets—that the FSB finally acknowledged the likelihood that the tragedy was the result of a terrorist attack. Both planes had taken off from the same Moscow airport, and they crashed... MORE

Last week saw a rare victory for the rule of law in a case involving Russian military atrocities in Chechnya—though it remains to be seen whether that victory will be consolidated. The military branch of the federal Supreme Court nullified April's verdict by a jury... MORE

The renaming of a Moscow street in honor of Akhmad Kadyrov (see Chechnya Weekly, August 25) seems to reveal a double standard on the part of the municipal authorities. Not only does the city have a law forbidding that any street be named after anyone... MORE

The Beslan horror marks a threefold escalation in Russia's civil war. First, the terrorists who seized that North Ossetian town's School No. 1 used new, gratuitously cruel tactics, not only deliberately targeting children but withholding food and drink from them and firing into their backs... MORE

The Chechen terrorist warlord Shamil Basayev, whom some think is more likely to claim responsibility for the terrorist actions of others than to deny responsibility for his own, stated firmly that he had nothing to do with the Beslan raid. In a statement published on... MORE

A curious detail about the hostage crisis was noted by the Grani.ru website in a September 2 report. The pediatrician Leonid Roshal, whom the Beslan hostage-takers specifically sought by name as a negotiator, played an ambiguous role in the 2002 Dubrovka hostage crisis. On the... MORE

Anna Politkovskaya, the Novaya gazeta correspondent who has written many fearless reports from Chechnya, was poisoned under suspicious circumstances while on her way to cover the hostage crisis in Beslan. The episode inevitably recalls the mysterious death of her colleague, the newspaper's deputy editor Yuri... MORE

Along with Anna Politkovskaya, one of the journalists reporting on Chechnya who is most disliked by the Kremlin is Andrei Babitsky of Radio Liberty. (Four years ago he was seized by mysterious kidnappers, thought widely to be agents of Russia's security services, and released only... MORE

One of the most striking features of the Beslan atrocity and its aftermath has been the unwillingness of Russia's top leadership to state clearly and candidly what it knows, or even what it thinks it knows. Though officials have repeatedly made with an air of... MORE

In a September 9 analysis for Gazeta.ru, the Moscow political scientist and former Yeltsin adviser Georgi Satarov suggested that the Russian and North Ossetian authorities' repeated falsehoods about the Beslan crisis during the period from September 1 to September 3 were literally murderous. The public... MORE