On Wednesday, September 5, Boris Nemtsov, one of the leaders of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) parliamentary faction in the Russian State Duma, together with other members of the faction, traveled by motorcade from Nazran, Ingushetia to the Chechen district center of Achkoi-Martan. The... MORE

Russian media offered extensive coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. A number of Russian commentators remarked that they believed that the international community would now be considerably more understanding toward the Russian war effort in Chechnya. "As for Chechnya,"... MORE

The September 13 issue of the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets carried an emotional statement by Boris Nemtsov, one of the leaders of the Union of Right Forces faction in the State Duma, which indicated that he had changed his position from a "dove" to a "hawk"... MORE

The Russian minister of defense, Sergei Ivanov, underlined on September 12 that the Russian army is in Chechnya "once and for all, and irrevocably. All of the basic units of the Combined Group of Forces," he emphasized, "will never leave the republic." The task at... MORE

On September 17, Chechen separatists announced that they had launched their largest-scale offensive in months "with a series of coordinated attacks across the Russian rebel region's lowlands, seizing buildings and shooting down a helicopter." Russian officials confirmed that a surge in fighting was under way.... MORE

The no. 36 (September 11) issue of Kommersant-Vlast contains a detailed report on the current situation in the Chechen refugee tent camps located in Ingushetia by journalist Elena Samoilova, who had just spent a week living in the camps (including sleeping there overnight). According to... MORE

On September 12, a delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), headed by Lord Frank Judd of Britain, arrived in Moscow. Judd was accompanied by the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, Alvaro Gil-Robles. The purpose of their visit was... MORE

On September 17--a day dubbed "Black Monday" by the Russian media--an estimated 300 Chechen separatist fighters seized "practically the entire city [of Gudermes]" in one hour of fighting (Kommersant, September 19). According to Reuters, the fall of Chechnya's second city "coupled with a string of... MORE

The renewed heavy fighting in Chechnya has sparked a broad-scale exodus of Chechen refugees--the largest "since February of 2000"--from the Chechen capital and other cities to northern districts of the republic, and to the already filled-to-overflowing refugee camps in neighboring Ingushetia (Utro.ru, September 20). The... MORE