Chechnya

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MOSCOW -- The separatist Chechen leader, who had attempted to inspire an Islamic rebellion against Russia across the northern Caucasus, was killed yesterday in a gunfight with police in his hometown. The death of Abdul Khalim Sadulayev, a former Islamic court judge who took over the Chechen resistance after the death of former Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, marks a serious blow to insurgents attempting to destabilize southern Russia and establish independence for Chechnya. "The terrorists have been virtually decapitated.

MOSCOW -- The Russian republic of Chechnya elected a new parliament yesterday, a vote viewed by the Kremlin as a political milestone but criticized by human rights activists as illegitimate in the midst of a guerrilla war and reports of police abductions and torture of civilians. The election of the Caucasus republic's 61-seat assembly marks the final step in the Kremlin's plan to bring peace to Chechnya, where separatists have been battling for independence since 1994. The Kremlin's plan eschewed negotiations with separatist rebels and instead called for a three-tiered political process aimed at giving the province a degree of autonomy from Moscow.