“Just think about it for a minute: If you’re sitting in the forest with a machine gun and have two-dozen relatives of a police colonel you wasted looking to avenge his blood, and your own desire for revenge against two dozen relatives of the cop... MORE

On August 10, Leonid Krivonos, the acting military commandant of Chechnya, stunned the Russian public by commenting that the Russian military command in Chechnya expects rebel activity in Chechnya to increase in August and September. Krivonos mentioned the recent ambushes and bombings of Russian military... MORE

On September 4, Chechen President Alu Alkhanov called for renaming Chechnya the “Nokhchiin Republic,” which is the republic’s name in the Chechen language. The idea, however, received a thumbs-down the following day from the republic’s prime minister and de facto strongman, Ramzan Kadyrov, as well... MORE

Chechen President Alu Alkhanov and Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov also diverged in their reactions to the violence in the Karelian city of Kondopoga. On August 30, a fight between an ethnic Azeri bartender and Slavic clients at an Azeri-run restaurant in the northern city... MORE

In an interview with the Agentstvo Natsionalnykh Novostei (ANN) published on August 22, the speaker of the lower house of Chechnya’s parliament, Dukvakha Abdurakhmanov, reiterated his call for Chechnya’s merger with Ingushetia and claimed that a number of districts in Dagestan belong to Chechnya. Asked... MORE

Aleksandr Torshin, a Federation Council senator who is also a member of the National Anti-Terrorist Committee (NAK), said on September 6 that 224 people had surrendered since July 15, when Federal Security Service (FSB) Chairman Nikolai Patrushev, who also heads the NAK, announced an amnesty... MORE

On September 5, the separatist Chechenpress website posted a statement by Dokku Umarov, president of the separatist Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (ChRI), marking the 15th anniversary of the republic’s declaration of independence. In his statement, the rebel leader vowed that the fight for independence would... MORE

Kavkazky Uzel reported on September 6 that in a poll carried out among residents of North Ossetia by the Caucasus Times information agency on the eve of the second anniversary of the Beslan tragedy, 88 percent of the respondents indicated they were unhappy with the... MORE

Moscow is attempting to once more tightly control the spread of Islamic ideology in the problematic region of the North Caucasus. Events in Chechnya and the spread of armed conflict across the whole area confront the Russian government with the same problems that were present... MORE

A shootout on September 13 between a group of armed Chechen OMON police commandos and Ingush police manning a traffic police post on the Chechen-Ingush administrative border resulted in the deaths of seven people–one Ingush police and six Chechen OMON. Among the victims was the... MORE