80% of Chechnya Taken, War to Ease, Russia Says

Russia's military expects fighting to ease in Chechnya after the fall of the last major separatist stronghold, but says the conflict can end only if the rebels drop plans to wage a partisan war, according to Reuters.


Russia said it controlled 80 percent of Chechnya following the fall of Shali, the last rebel bastion, on Friday. A government commission met in Moscow at the weekend to discuss plans to rebuild the shattered region, Reuters said.


Colonel General Anatoly Kulikov, commander of the joint force of army and Interior Ministry troops in Chechnya, said the main battle appeared over, but the rebels were likely to fight on.


"The so-called 'Dudayev's Army' has been routed," Kulikov was quoted as saying in the weekend edition of the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda.


"I think the Chechen events will by summer turn into a slow-going conflict," he added.


In Moscow, the Federal Counterintelligence Service said Monday two St. Petersburg journalists who disappeared in Chechnya had been killed and buried by Chechen loyalists.


The journalists, Maxim Shabalin, 26, and Felix Titov, 35, who are correspondents for the St. Petersburg newspaper Nevskoye Vremya, were killed in February and rapidly buried by Chechen fighters, a spokesman for the FSK said.


"I know what everyone here knows. Chechen fighters stopped them, and then buried them," said the spokesman, Vladimir Komarovsky.


A Chechen official quoted by Interfax, however, said the rebel regime "has nothing to do" with the disappearance and implied Russian responsibility, saying Shabalin and Titov "were staying on territory controlled by Russian forces."


The editor of Nevskoye Vremya, Alla Manilova, also cast doubt on the FSK account. "One cannot take such a version seriously," Manilova said.


She added she did not understand how people who had never seen Shabalin and Titov before were able to identify their bodies. She said no FSK investigators had questioned anybody on the newspaper, which is carrying out its own investigation.


The FSK public relations center said Sunday that "somebody" saw the two journalists on a bus en route from Grozny to Samashky on Feb. 26 or 27.


Later, the FSK said, the bus was stopped by Chechen fighters who forced the journalists off the bus, saying journalists "write lies" about the Chechens. The next day two corpses were found by some locals and the service said they were identified as the missing journalists.