The already poor state of Russian-Chechen relations took a precipitous nosedive last week when the bodies of ten to twelve persons, most of them ethnic Russians, were reported to have been discovered in the Chechen capital of Djohar. During talks held with Lord Frank Judd... MORE

On March 23, Il'yas Akhmadov, the separatist foreign minister of Chechnya, spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. He noted that he had been in the U.S. capital for two weeks, during which time he had had discussions with Senators Paul Wellstone and... MORE

The March 30 issue of the French newspaper Liberation carried the text of an interview conducted with Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. Much of the interview concerned the volatile Georgian-Chechen border area. "In this region, on the Georgian side," Shevardnadze commented, "live 16,000 ethnic Chechens [Kists]... MORE

The March 26 issue of the newspaper Kommersant featured an interview with retired MVD general Aslambek Aslakhanov, the elected representative from Chechnya to the Russian State Duma. On March 23, Aslakhanov chaired a conference of the Union for the Rebirth of Peace and Accord in... MORE

The no. 13 (March 27-April 2) issue of the weekly Moskovskie Novosti carried a piece in which two of its journalists, Sanobar Shermatova and Rustam Khadikov, reported that, at the end of February, all of the leading field commanders of the Chechen separatists had gathered... MORE

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland, has announced that she will not be seeking a second term and will step down in September when her four-year term ends. Russian diplomats did not attempt to conceal both their... MORE

On March 24, car bombs took the lives of twenty-three persons and wounded 153 in the towns of Mineral'nye Vody and Essentuki (both in Stavropol' Krai) and in a village near Cherkessk in the autonomous republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia (RIA Novosti, March 30). Russian government spokesmen... MORE

On March 29--the day after Vladimir Putin had announced major personnel changes within the Russian power ministries--he met with the members of the newly recast Security Council, whose secretary is now Vladimir Rushailo, formerly the Russian minister of internal affairs. (For a detailed biography of... MORE

On April 10, it was announced that a new "mass burial ground" containing the bodies of seventeen or eighteen Chechens who had apparently been executed, had been discovered in the basement of a police building located in the Oktyabrsky District of the Chechen capital of... MORE