— CHECHNYA:

Boris Yeltsin’s representative in Chechnya was taken hostage there last May. The representative’s deputy, trying to negotiate his boss’s release, was himself abducted last Tuesday. His captors have asked US$4 million in ransom. Many blame (or credit) Salman Raduev, a Chechen guerrilla leader who during the war with Russia led a bloody hostage-taking raid on a hospital in Budennovsk. Raduev now commands the irregular Armed Forces of the Confederation of the Peoples of Chechnya and Dagestan. He and leaders of forty opposition groups met last week in Chechnya to call for the resignation of Chechnya’s elected president, Aslan Maskhadov, considered too pro-Moscow.