Chechnya

An uncle of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings said his nephews had brought shame to his family and ethnicity, while their father insisted they were innocent and had been framed. The uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said Friday from his front lawn in Montgomery Village that he had been following news reports and never could have imagined his brother's children were involved in the attack. He and another brother living in the middle-class Washington suburb said they have been estranged from the suspects' family.

An uncle of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings said his nephews had brought shame to his family and ethnicity, while their father insisted they were innocent and had been framed. The uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, said Friday from his front lawn in Montgomery Village that he had been following news reports and never could have imagined his brother's children were involved in the attack. He and another brother living in the middle-class Washington suburb said they have been estranged from the suspects' family.

NEARLY 10 years ago, Russia decided to launch a pre-emptive war. An offending government was ousted, even as objectives became blurred - and even as the fighting dragged on. The war was declared to be over (several times), and was eventually portrayed as one against "terrorism." And there is, indeed, no denying that Islamic extremists of a violent and opportunistic bent have been attracted to the fight against an imperialistic, occupying power. This was in Chechnya, of course, where on Sunday the Kremlin's hand-picked leader, Akhmad Kadyrov, was blown up by an artillery shell planted under a reviewing stand.

Russian soldiers killed by rebels near Chechnya ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia : At least two Russian soldiers were killed and 10 others were wounded yesterday when rebels ambushed a military convoy in a volatile Russian province near Chechnya, officials said. The Russian Interior Ministry in the southern province of Ingushetia said about a dozen militants ambushed a military convoy on a forest road in the Sunzha region yesterday. It said in a statement that the attackers fired automatic weapons and grenades at military trucks, killing two soldiers and wounding others.

Paris -- The attack on Chechnya has been an attempt by Boris Yeltsin's government to solve one crisis by creating another. It has been an attempt to distract Russians from the country's dramatic political and economic situation by giving them a successful war of colonial reconquest in the Caucasus. This has gone wrong, and the result may be very bad.The gamble deserves to have gone wrong since it was not only cruel but stupid. There was no real justification for this attack -- for all this killing and destruction, and for the precedents that now have been set for Moscow's dealings with the non-Russian peoples once part of the Czarist and Soviet empires.

This article first appeared in the Economist: MOSCOW -- If this is victory, what would a stalemate look like? Even in winter, when the Chechen fighters were at their most vulnerable -- cold, hungry and visible through the bare trees -- the Russian forces, which outnumber them at least tenfold, failed to destroy them. Now spring is making conditions in the mountains friendlier for the Chechens. The war goes on. On April 27, Russia reported 10 dead from a Chechen ambush; another one the day before killed 15. The fighting is in areas which Russia claims to have controlled for weeks.

A SUBTLE but significant change of government has occurred in Russia. The dispatch of Russian soldiers and security forces into Chechnya, the breakaway republic, and the protest it has caused among supporters of reform and "democrats," has realigned the political forces in Russia, more so than did the disbanding of the Parliament in October 1993. Authoritarian rule may be gaining momentum.However distasteful many democrats might have found President Boris N. Yeltsin's decision to shell the Parliament building more than a year ago, they by and large closed ranks behind him. Indeed, the confrontation between Mr. Yeltsin and the retrograde Parliament was the basis for a renewal of the alliance between him and the Western-oriented intellectuals who entered Russia's political fray in the days of "perestroika."

MOSCOW - A truck exploded yesterday near a government complex in Chechnya in what officials said was the fourth suicide bombing in or near the republic in five weeks. At least two people, believed to be suicide bombers, died, and several more were wounded, the officials said. The attack occurred in the afternoon in the Staropromyslovksy district of Chechnya's capital, Grozny, not far from a police headquarters and a regional office of Russia's Interior Ministry. The force of the blast gouged a deep crater in the road and badly damaged several buildings, but initial accounts - as well as the toll of dead and injured - were wildly contradictory.

MOSCOW -- Fighting intensified throughout the day yesterday in Chechnya, but the Russian aim still seems to be to place maximum psychological pressure on the breakaway republic rather than trying to overrun it in a full-scale assault.As heavy skirmishing was taking place on the outskirts of Grozny, the Chechen capital, President Boris N. Yeltsin's chief of staff warned last night that Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev had only "several hours" in which to order his men to lay down their arms.

MOSCOW -- Boris N. Yeltsin, so unsteady a week ago that his aides were forced to guide him by the elbows, delivered a firm and clearly spoken address to the Russian parliament yesterday, defending his policy on Chechnya but acknowledging that much of its execution has gone seriously wrong.The Russian president has been little seen since he ordered 40,000 troops into the breakaway republic 10 weeks ago, fueling speculation that his health was deteriorating badly just as the country was descending into a bloody and potentially disastrous conflict.

Oct. 23 2002 Gunmen seized a crowded Moscow theater, taking hundreds hostage and threatening to kill them unless the Russian army pulled out of Chechnya.

MOSCOW -- A Russian military helicopter crashed during a combat mission against separatist guerrillas in Russia's southern republic of Chechnya yesterday, killing at least 18 soldiers, authorities said. Initial reports said the craft was brought down by rebel fire, but officials said later that mechanical failure was more likely the cause. Three insurgents were also reported killed in the battle, but others apparently escaped into nearby mountains. The exact death toll remained unclear, with the Russian news agency RIA Novosti citing an unnamed local security source, reporting yesterday evening that 20 severely burned bodies had been found near the crash site.

CLARIFICATION The April 24 obituary of Boris Yeltsin carried a Moscow dateline and identified the writer as a Sun foreign reporter. The writer, Will Englund, was a Sun Moscow correspondent who reported on Yeltsin, and who is now on the newspaper's editorial board. MOSCOW -- Boris N. Yeltsin, the Russian leader who broke the Soviet Union and the system it had created, died yesterday in Moscow of complications from chronic heart problems. He was 76. Mr.

MOSCOW -- Russian federal police in war-battered Chechnya regularly engage in torture of detainees, the republic's Kremlin-backed president declared yesterday, as he announced a criminal investigation into the alleged abuse. President Ramzan Kadyrov, whose own Chechen forces have faced frequent allegations of human rights abuses, including kidnappings, torture and murder, singled out a detention facility known as ORB-2 run by the Russian Interior Ministry in the town of Urus-Martan. "The situation at the Operative and Investigative Bureau No. 2, where detainees are systematically subjected to torture, is totally unacceptable," Kadyrov told journalists in the Chechen capital, Grozny, according to the Russian news agency Interfax.

MOSCOW -- A Kremlin-backed strongman who has spearheaded efforts to pacify war-battered Chechnya through a mix of repression and economic reconstruction won legislative approval yesterday as president of the region in southern Russia. Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of a former Chechen president who was assassinated in 2004, is a former prime minister. He has been the most powerful figure in the region since his father's death but didn't turn 30, the minimum age for the presidency, until October.

Russia is a country run by means of fear - not terror, by and large, but a quietly pervasive in-the-background fear. Fear of Chechens, fear of the law, fear of the arbitrariness of the state, fear of power. It serves President Vladimir V. Putin's purposes well because it distracts people, cows them, induces them to leave the politicians alone. To be not afraid is to be subversive. Anna Politkovskaya was not afraid, and now she is dead. She was the third journalist with Novaya Gazeta to be murdered since 2000.

VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia -- The helicopter gunships came back from the east, flying low and parallel to a stony range of mountains, a rampart of the Caucasus. They had run missions over Chechnya. Now, missile batteries empty, they carried the casualties of Russia's latest mountain war.The helicopters materialized out of a cold haze that hugged the steppe. They were the fearsomely skeletal creatures that the Russians call Crocodiles.Orderlies with stretchers ran to meet them. The orderlies brought their charges into the emergency medical station at the airport: young men, draftees.

DUBA-YURT, Russia -- As Russian fighter jets swooped over his village in Chechnya, 69-year-old Magomed Elbuzdukayev shook a fist in anger -- not at the bombers but at the young man running with a rifle toward the neighborhood under fire."

MOSCOW -- A well-known Russian journalist who reported critically, relentlessly and fearlessly on everything from the Kremlin's policy in Chechnya to corruption in the military was shot dead yesterday, officials said, the latest in a string of killings of reporters in recent years. A neighbor found the body of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative reporter for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, a handgun and four bullets nearby, Russian news agencies reported.

The president of Chechnya - the rebellious redoubt in the Caucasus Mountains that was famous for kidnappings and beheadings and organized crime until the Russian army essentially blew it to smithereens, so that it is now principally famous for jihad and ambushes and wreckage and corruption - believes it has an image problem. He says Chechnya is a Russian word that by now is loaded with negative associations. He suggests that the whole world would feel better about the place if the people there adapted a local term and began calling it the Republic of Nokhchiin instead.