Not a single draftee came from Chechnya in last fall's draft. Not a single draftee came from Chechnya in last fall's draft, General Staff deputy head Vasily Smirnov announced Thursday. Smirnov did not provide a specific reason for the lack of draftees, instead saying "[to get...

Hübner and his colleague Johann Gudenus, leader of the Free Democrats' faction in Vienna's City Council, held talks with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov in Grozny last week. A visit to Chechnya by two right-wing lawmakers from Austria has drawn outrage from human rights activists and is triggering a political scandal in their homeland. Johannes Hübner, a deputy of the Free Democratic Party in the Austrian parliament, said Wednesday...

... of female DNA on the weapon, Murad Musayev, a defense lawyer for suspects in the 2006 killing, told Interfax. Politkovskaya was gunned down in her apartment building on Oct. 7, 2006, after years of writing critical reports about human rights abuse in Chechnya. The prosecution has insisted that Rustam Makhmudov, who hails from Chechnya, was the killer. He was arrested last year after spending five years in hiding abroad. Three other men, including two of Makhmudov's brothers, were tried for the murder...

... Umarov said. Umarov said his militants would continue carrying out attacks on police and government targets. 
 Umarov's statement appears aimed to capitalize on the opposition's challenge to Putin, who sent troops to the North Caucasus province of Chechnya in 1999, during a previous stint as prime minister, to crush a separatist government and re-establish Kremlin rule. 
 Putin, president from 2000 to 2008, is expected to win a new six-year term in a presidential election next month. 
The...

... same time, Kadyrov described Navalny as a "smart, prepared employee of some kind of service," suggesting possible ties to foreign organizations. Navalny, a self-described national-democrat, is known for using harsh language when talking about Chechnya and other North Caucasus states, accusing them of subsisting largely off government largesse. In particular, Navalny popularized the slogan "Stop feeding the Caucasus," which has become a clarion call among nationalists. Oddly, Kadyrov...

... reported that Federal Migration Service chief Konstantin Romodanovsky had reviewed the case and decided that the revocation of Nivat’s visa would not stand. Nivat, 42, achieved considerable publicity during the late 1990s when she covered the war in Chechnya for French daily newspaper Liberation. In her book "Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War in Chechnya," published in 2000, she described how she reported from the North Caucasus disguised as a Chechen peasant...

... said Wednesday. The Russian government will spend 60 billion rubles ($2.01 billion) on transport and utilities infrastructure, according to a statement Wednesday. Private business will finance the resort infrastructure. The North Caucasus area includes Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. (Bloomberg)

... supporters, and the paratroopers are one of the most professional and cohesive branches of the Russian military. The paratroopers have their own songs, but they tend to be about the Soviet military operation in Afghanistan or the separatist wars in Chechnya in the 1990s. So some military officers were not pleased to see men in the paratroopers' distinctive blue berets and striped undershirts singing a song criticizing Putin. The chairman of the Union of Paratroopers said the song runs counter to...

... provided the bulk of the court's complaints, producing a flood of more than 40,000, or 29 percent of the total, from 2002 to 2010. Moscow has lost some 90 percent of the cases that the court decided to hear. Most of them stem from the armed conflict in Chechnya. Hammarberg said that while the government has always paid compensations as required, it has done little to punish those responsible. "Most of the problems are related to the investigations," he said. Regarded as Europe's most high-profile...

... attention away from public policy failures, but also helped to boost self-esteem among the Russians by shifting responsibility onto scapegoats. A third source of tensions stems from the unresolved internal conflict in the North Caucasus. The topic of Chechnya has featured prominently in political debates, especially during the current election season because it is viewed as a promising way of rallying public support. The most common themes for speculation are the massive transfers from the federal...

... suspected in killing an ethnic Russian fan. Opponents of various political stripes have long expressed outrage at the problems in the Northern Caucasus, where Kremlin-supported authorities are viewed by many as corrupt. Ramzan Kadyrov, president of Chechnya and a former warlord accused of human rights violations, has lavishly rebuilt the once war-ravaged republic using large subsidies from Moscow, which many critics say have been largely wasted. The Caucasus issue, once a banner of hard-line anti-immigrant...