ABDUCTORS OF YELTSIN’S CHECHEN ENVOY READY TO SWAP HIM FOR WARTIME LEADER.

According to maverick Chechen warlord Salman Raduev, the kidnappers of President Yeltsin’s envoy to Chechnya would be willing to release him without a ransom in exchange for Doku Zavgaev. Zavgaev headed Chechnya’s pro-Moscow puppet government during the 1994-96 war (Russian agencies, September 28). It is now known that the envoy, Valentin Vlasov, who was kidnapped on May 1, is being held by the same people who kidnapped the two British aid workers, Camilla Carr and Jon James. The aid workers’ release after fourteen months’ captivity was secured last week by Russian financier Boris Berezovsky. Carr and James told a British newspaper last weekend that they shared their cell with Vlasov during the last five months of their captivity. They described him as an abrasive man who frequently quarreled with the guards (The Mail on Sunday, September 27). Carr told the newspaper she had been raped repeatedly by one of her captors while James was manacled nearby. The attacks continued over several months, but she never saw the rapist’s face since all their guards wore masks. Originally, Carr said, she intended to conceal the experience since it was so personal. She eventually decided she must speak of it because it was “part of the truth of what happened.” James was beaten by the guards and the two of them were submitted to a mock execution. When the bolt of his rifle jammed, one of their tormentors told them it had all been a joke. But Carr and James said they had forgiven their captors since they were psychologically damaged by the 1994-96 war (The Mail on Sunday, September 27).

POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS IN KALININGRAD REGION’S PLEAS FOR BALTIC AID.