Beslan, Russia News

In a telephone call to RFE/RL, veteran Chechen guerrilla leader Doku Umarov says he is alive and planning future attacks on the territory of the Russian Federation.

The Chechen rebel group behind the 2004 Beslan school massacre has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing last week that badly wounded the president of Russia's southern region of Ingushetia.

Murder cases don't come much more bizarre than the one that preoccupied me during the winter of 2006-07 - the slow, agonising death of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko.

The arbitrary detention and killings of young Muslim men in the North Caucasus has brought the region to the boiling point.

A row of Russian and Abkhaz flags flutter in the Black Sea breeze in front of the stately government headquarters in the Abkhaz capital.

The death three years ago today of Chechen Republic Ichkeria President and resistance commander Abdul-Khalim Sadullayev was a milestone in the evolution of what emerged in 1994 as an almost exclusively Chechen fight for independence into a pan-Caucasian, multinational Islamic resistance movement.

He will be remembered this week in many countries, that young man without a name, without a past or future.

LJ user liza-valieva - North Ossetian journalist Liza Valieva - writes about an incident that could have prompted a lighthearted reaction had it not occurred in North Ossetia , an autonomous republic in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation, whose people have seen much violence since the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the ...

Authoritarianism is like a rock. Once it is dropped, it can only go in one direction -- down.

A suicide bomber plotting to blow up the Chechen Interior Ministry building killed two police officers and the taxi driver who drove him to the building, prompting Chechen President -Ramzan Kadyrov to call for all insurgents to surrender or be killed.

More signs that the assault on public and personal freedoms in the Russian Federation is gathering place in a truly unpleasant way.

Recently, Freedom House , a U.S.-based non-governmental organization, released its annual survey on freedom of the press.

Averting the Caucasus Jihad By Gordon M. Hahn To Our Readers The Moscow Times welcomes letters to the editor.

FEW places on earth have been as systematically brutalised over the past decade as Chechnya.

MOSCOW, April 10 Russia won't find a better Georgian president than Saakashvili / Turkmenistan accuses Russia over gas pipeline explosion / Beslan children required to pay taxes on free education / Pork scandal brewing in Russian-U.S. relations Komersant Russia won't find a better Georgian president than Saakashvili The growing political tensions ...

When terrorists took more than 1,000 hostages in 2004 at a school in Beslan, Russia, the bloody three-day affair gave experts insight into how extremist groups operate and how law enforcement should prepare.

Tragedy ... some of the faces of the children killed during the Beslan school hostage crisis / Reuters German school shooting among the worst More died than in Columbine massacre World news : Latest around the ...

If you think it's easy to set up a sister city program, talk to Kitty Boniske . "Vladikavkaz was our third try," the longtime Asheville Sister Cities volunteer recalls.

On September 1, 2004, militant separatists from nearby Chechnya occupied a grade school in Beslan, a town in the Russian republic of North Ossetia-Alania. It was the first day of classes-the "day of knowledge," ...

AS COUPLES walked arm in arm down this city's sleepy main street, the news was more of the same.