NEWS
By Will Englund | April 24, 2007
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. Yeltsin was magnetic and fearless, a tough provincial brawler who was a classic Russian type and was recognized as such by the Russians.
NEWS
By Frank Langfitt | December 11, 1999
BEIJING -- China and Russia sent a stern message yesterday to the United States: You may be the only superpower, but don't try running our worlds.The message came as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin wrapped up a two-day, informal summit here with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.In a joint statement, the two leaders used veiled language to accuse the United States of imposing its culture and values on the rest of the world and of using human rights as a pretext for meddling in the internal affairs of other nations.
NEWS
By Will Englund | September 9, 1999
MOSCOW -- Every night, Russian television news programs show tanks firing and bombers bombing in Dagestan. Ordnance explodes and smoke billows in the mountain valleys. But some here are beginning to suspect that this latest war in the Caucasus is not all that it seems.Two weeks ago, Islamic militants led by Shamil Basayev stopped fighting and melted back across the border into neighboring Chechnya, leaving the Russian air force to spend several hours flattening what was by then a deserted village.
NEWS
By Kathy Lally | September 14, 1999
MOSCOW -- Frightened Muscovites stood in the mud and cold rain yesterday, wondering when the next bomb would come and whom it would kill. They talked, cried and argued, agreeing on one terrible conclusion: A war of Islamic terrorism has begun here.The bomb that exploded early yesterday in an ordinary Moscow neighborhood killed more than 70 people and turned an eight-story, yellow-brick apartment building into a heap of smoldering rubble. It was the third Russian apartment building blown up in 10 days; more than 200 fathers, mothers and children were killed, and the number was certain to rise as rescuers picked through the latest tangle of lethal concrete slabs.
NEWS
By Trudy Rubin | October 4, 1999
TO ANYONE who observed Russia's brutal war in Chechnya earlier this decade, its headlong rush into another tangle with Muslim mountain warriors appears mad.It is a true "wag the dog" scenario: Russian politicians, with an eye to coming parliamentary and presidential elections, are trying to distract voters from corruption scandals and economic woes.Russia has massed tens of thousands of troops on the Chechen border, and is bombing an already pulverized republic back beyond the Stone Age, supposedly to crush Islamic militants.
NEWS
By Will Englund | August 29, 1999
MOSCOW -- When Russia's prime minister made a surprise visit to Dagestan Friday he handed out medals all around to the fighters who had driven a band of Islamic rebels out of the mountains and back into Chechnya, but no one is pretending that the latest war in the Caucasus is over.The rebel leader, Shamil Basaev, had ordered his men to pull back from the villages they had seized in western Dagestan after they took a pounding from Russian planes and artillery, but he vowed last week to take the fight to Russia in other ways and other places.
NEWS
November 24, 1999
NEARLY 200 years ago, when Russia extended its empire to the Caucasus mountain region, one fortress carried a warning to the rebellious locals. It was called Grozny -- "threatening."Today, invading Russians feel Grozny is so threatening that they are bombing it out of existence. Moscow officials say that once Russian troops retake it, the capital of the rebellious republic of Chechnya will not be worth rebuilding.Russia's decision to retake Chechnya from Islamic separatists has caused terrible suffering and misery.
NEWS
September 20, 1999
Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the Boston Globe, which was published Wednesday.NO perpetrator has been caught and there have been no plausible claims of responsibility for the bomb blasts that killed nearly 300 people sleeping in their apartments in Russia during the past two weeks, but there is no mistaking the traumatic effects of this apparent terrorist campaign.The Russian public's demand for security would be the same almost anywhere in the world. The corrupt and racist response from the authorities defines the particular qualities of Russia's current breakdown.
NEWS
By Kathy Lally | October 6, 1999
MOSCOW -- Russia has lost two airplanes over Chechnya in three days, and if they were shot down by the portable Stinger surface-to-air missile, the war has escalated to an unexpectedly sophisticated level.During nearly two years of an earlier war, from the end of 1994 until mid-1996, the Chechens never managed to shoot down a Sukhoi-24 bomber, and during the entire war shot down only about five Sukhoi-25 attack planes, according to various reports.Chechen fighters, armed with a U.S.-made Stinger missile, shot down a Sukhoi-25 on Sunday, according to Col. Islam Khasukhanov, Chechnya's deputy chief of staff, who said the pilot was killed in the crash.
NEWS
By Kathy Lally | September 26, 1999
MOSCOW -- The television image was chilling: A Russian hostage in Chechnya, after making a heartfelt plea for the rescue of his friends, lay down on the ground and was beheaded by an ax-wielding fighter wearing a black hood.Moments later, the report showed a young Russian soldier, crying, pleading that he could stand the torture no more. A masked man ordered him to hold out his hand. Then he shot off the soldier's finger.Those video clips, and others like them, have been turning up on television here in the past few weeks as Russia wages war on insurgents in its southern, Muslim territories of Chechnya and Dagestan.