Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov turned 30, the minimum age under the republic’s constitution for the post of president, on October 5. Kadyrov gave several interviews that covered a wide variety of subjects. Perhaps most significantly, Kadyrov once again insisted in one of the interviews... MORE

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced on October 3 that two guard platoons comprised of soldiers from the Vostok (East) and Zapad (West) battalions of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) of the General Staff of the Russian Army will guard Russian engineers who have been... MORE

Chechenpress on September 30 published a series of decrees by Chechen rebel leader Dokku Umarov “on the reorganization of the fronts the ChRI VS [Chechen Republic of Ichkeria Armed Forces] and on new appointments of commanders.” The 13 decrees—the texts of which, according to the... MORE

Last summer, following the death of Abdul-Khalim Sadulaev in Chechnya, the successor to Aslan Maskhadov as the Chechen rebel leader, senior field commander Dokku Umarov, became the top leader of the Chechen and the North Caucasian insurgency. When Shamil Basaev died in Ingushetia last July,... MORE

As was the case with the dozens of other murders of journalists in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya on October 7 has been followed by much speculation about the identity of those who ordered the investigative journalist’s... MORE

Regardless of one’s feeling about Chechnya’s prime minister and his human rights record, an argument can be made that it was not in Kadyrov’s interest to kill Anna Politkovskaya—at least not by means of an apparent contract murder carried out by a gunman in broad... MORE

President Vladimir Putin’s first reaction to the murder of Anna Politkovskaya came on October 9, when he was quoted as telling President George W. Bush in a telephone conversation that everything possible would be done to solve the murder. “Putin stressed that the Russian law... MORE

Novaya gazeta, in its October 10 issue, published sections of the unfinished articles that Anna Politkovskaya was working on at the time of her murder, which focused on people who had been jailed and tortured in Chechnya after they were accused of being terrorists. In... MORE

Police in Nazran, Ingushetia, on October 16 violently broke up a demonstration by dozens of activists demanding that the federal authorities find the killers of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. “In Nazran the meeting was broken up with brute force and five people were detained by the... MORE

Lidia Yusupova, the Chechen lawyer who worked for the Memorial human rights group’s office in Grozny and was nominated this year for the Nobel Peace Prize, talked in an interview with Kavkazky Uzel published on October 17 about the telephone threat she received on October... MORE