The assassination of Ahmed Kadyrov, Chechnya's pro-Kremlin president, on May 9 has thrown into chaos president Vladimir Putin's plans for ending the Chechen resistance to Russian imperialism...
President Vladimir Putin is engaged in a systematic and murderous campaign of suppression of Chechnya’s struggle for independence. In this campaign anyone sympathetic to Chechnya’s desire and aspiration to leave the Russian Federation is classified as terrorist...
Russian president Vladimir Putin got more than he bargained for during his first-ever trip to Malaysia on August 5, as part of his effort to increase the sales of Russian arms in this part of the world.
The "suicide bombing" by two young women (both apparently Chechens) on July 5, which killed 14 people at an open-air rock festival on the outskirts of Moscow, has proven to be a blow to president Vladimir Putin’s efforts to convince the Russian people that the war is over, and has been won.
President Vladimir Putin is now even more determined to resist the Chechen people’s fight for independence, as he faces parliamentary elections this year and a presidential poll next year. Anxious to give the impression that the pledge he was elected on–to end the Chechens’ struggle for independence–has in fact been carried out...
President Vladimir Putin was quick to claim overwhelming support for the referendum held in Chechnya on March 23 to give the impression that the ‘separatists’ have been defeated. He also wanted the Chechens to seem to approve a Kremlin-written constitution that reconfirms the republic as part of the Russian Federation...
The crash of a Russian army helicopter on August 19 near Johar-Gala (Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, also known as Ichkeria), in which at least 114 Russian soldiers, many of them officers, died, was a great embarrassment both to the military and to president Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin — a former KGB operative plucked from obscurity by President Boris Yeltsin, who appointed him prime minister of Russia — used the Chechen war to secure his election as president in March 2000, and continues to exploit it to maintain his popularity while conceding privately that victory is not on the cards.
The indomitable Chechen fighters and their supporters have done it again, catching Vladimir Putin on the hop. On April 14, Adam Deniyev, the second most senior leader of the pro-Kremlin administration in Chechnya, was assassinated by a bomb as he left a television studio.
Credit where credit is due: to the Chechen people, whose successful defiance of the Russian army’s might has come to dominate the policies and activities of president Vladimir Putin and his aides in recent weeks, although he insists (with little credibility) that Moscow has won a resounding victory and will soon withdraw the Russian army.
Russian president Vladimir Putin signed three major decrees in one week last month, making important changes to the Russian occupation regime in Chechnya...