Word: chechen
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...aging officers over the next three to six years, and train hundreds of thousands of fresh, paid soldiers in modern warfare. But today's high school graduates were born when Russia's birth rate hit an all-time low in the early 1990s, and were raised during the disastrous Chechen war. Near the decrepit train station of Vladimir, a military town near Moscow, an army-recruiting center promises a life of adventure for those who sign up. THE ARMY OF RUSSIA - AN ARMY OF PROFESSIONALS, says a billboard, showing a young man in a leather military helmet peering...
...sometimes pay ransoms - especially on land in kidnap-heavy countries like Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela - despite insisting that they do not. In 2001, for example, the Dutch government paid $1 million to free a doctor working for the aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) who had been kidnapped by Chechen rebels; the government later tried to recoup the money from MSF. "Ransoms are certainly being paid," Antonia Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, said in an e-mail on Friday. "Of course governments do not want to make this public because...
...When Vladimir Putin was appointed Russian prime minister in 1999, Chechnya was a de facto independent region where Russia had already fought one bloody war. One of Putin's first moves, before he became President, was to launch the Second Chechen War. Kadyrov's father, Akhmad, was installed by Moscow as part of its new strategy of "Chechenization" of the conflict: turning power over to local rebels-turned-allies...
More seriously, the unsolved murders of crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, human-rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova as well as the recent shootings of Ruslan and Sulim Yamadayev and Umar Israilov - enemies of Kremlin-supported Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov - and the poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 point to a rule of lawlessness rather than the growing influence of a new code of professional behavior...
...statement" than attacking local humanitarian staff, says the ODI report. Aid organizations have always insisted that they do not pay ransoms for their kidnapped staff. But the reality is more complicated. A few years ago, MSF Holland won a lawsuit against the Dutch government, which admitted it had paid Chechen rebels $1 million to free a kidnapped MSF aid worker; rather than being grateful, the aid organization was incensed, claiming that the payment violated its rules and placed its staff in greater danger elsewhere. (See pictures of Darfur...