Word: chechnya
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MOSCOW: Russian soldiers of the 245th motorized rifle regiment began pulling out of Chechnya and heading home to Moscow. But whether the troops will stay out of Chechnya is still very much up in the air. In the past, the Kremlin has announced "withdrawals" which have turned out to be minor troop redeployments and rotations. "There's still a long way to go," says TIME's Sally Donnelly. "About 45,000 Russian troops are still stationed in Chechnya right now. No dramatic peace initiatives will happen before the election, and a lot could still go wrong on the ground...
...democratic reforms in Russia. On the contrary, he relies heavily on the old apparatus. Yeltsin made a party career under Leonid Brezhnev, attempted a power grab in a military coup and finally was able to establish himself as a semi-dictator. Since then he has started a war with Chechnya and dismissed all its critics. Yeltsin is responsible for the continued killing of thousands of civilians, including children. Is this the democrat the West wants? A shift of power to any other candidate would at least add credibility to the democratic mechanism. The worst thing the West...
...year ago, most pundits and talking heads repeated different versions of the same analysis: Boris Yeltsin was finished. Critics of Yeltsin's administration cited ill health, rumors of alcoholism, an unpopular war in Chechnya, vast public dissatisfaction with the state of reforms and increasingly tough economic times. But in the past few months, Yeltsin transformed himself from an ailing recluse to a populist dynamo. He bulldogged his way through campaign stops and photo ops, dancing at a pop concert with fierce, arm-pumping concentration in one memorable moment. "With new advisors like former privatization minister Anatoly Chubais, and NTV head...
...that? He has tried to pay off some of those back salaries, and last week he decreed that only volunteers will be sent to Chechnya, but now he is contemplating another radical move: firing Pavel Grachev, the Minister of Defense who has stood by Yeltsin since the coup in 1991. Fragmented as it is, the military still respects the chain of command, so Yeltsin needs a popular and loyal Defense Minister to keep the top officers in line. Grachev, one of the main culprits of the Chechen misadventure, is highly unpopular, and now his loyalty is in doubt as well...
Last month Grachev was summoned before the Communist-dominated State Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament). The Duma wanted an explanation for the slaughter of up to 93 Russian soldiers in a rebel ambush in Chechnya. Grachev publicly decried "all the outrages that are happening in this country" and offered to resign, should the Duma require it. "He was signaling to Yeltsin that his loyalty could not be taken for granted," says the defense analyst. "And he [was] also signaling to the opposition that he might not be all that loyal to Yeltsin anymore...