Recruiting for European Waffen SS units focused on the destruction of Russian communism and the overthrow of Joseph Stalin, which appealed strongly to many Ukrainians who had fresh memories of the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made 1932-33 famine in Ukraine that killed at least four million people,...
Before heading to Chechnya, Putin visited for the first time in at least 16 years the town Beslan in North Ossetia. The 2004 school siege by Islamic militants there left more than 330 dead in what has been the bloodiest incident of its kind in modern Russian history. Am...
Image:A troupe of dancers perform for troops at a base on the outskirts of Grozny. File pic: Reuters The republic's leader Ramzan Kadyrov instructed culture minister Musa Dadayev to make Chechen music "conform to the Chechen mentality," the Moscow Times said. "Borrowing musical culture from o...
“Cutting ears may seem savage to some, but it has its explanations,” said one commander. “It’s an old tradition among the special forces--you cut off the ears of the enemy in order to later lay them on the tombstone of your friend who was killed in the war. . . . It’s not...
(also known as Amir Seifulla). The amirs of other sectors were each given responsibilities under Astemirov’s command. One of those killed in the assault on Nalchik’s FSB headquarters was Ilyas Gorchkhanov, the leader of the Ingush Jamaat. The amirs of Ossetia and Krasnodar regions were...
In 1996 Dudayev was killed during Russian shelling, and the following year former guerrilla leader Aslan Maskhadov was elected president. Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed a provisional peace treaty in May 1997 but left the question of Chechnya’s eventual status undetermined. It ...