We need a strong police force - the Interior Ministry of the Republic of Chechnya. We have to get rid of the traitors who have managed to penetrate into the law-enforcement department.
Akhmad Kadyrov
Military troops were withdrawn from Chechnya on Dec. 31, 1996.
Criminals were coming to Chechnya from all over the world - they did not have a place in their own countries. But they could live perfectly well in Chechnya.
One has to work for years and decades, to conduct negotiations, to stand for positions and points of view, to jointly develop a civilized view on the administrative and state organization of Chechnya.
The people have already determined Chechnya's status at the referendum - it is a unit of the Russian Federation. Its political status is not to be discussed any more.
No one else will really care, but I missed the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Also the war in Chechnya.
Anderson Cooper
After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'
Anthony Marra
Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.
Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya's remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty.
When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.
During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.
I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.
I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.
I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book.
While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled 'Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour' on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic's first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.
Despite my best efforts, word that an American tourist was in town quickly made its way around Grozny. That I had come to Chechnya not for business or NGO work, but to see the sites and meet the people, was notable enough to be broadcast throughout the republic.
A foreign ideology cannot be introduced into Chechnya - were it through an Arab or al-Qaeda. Our experience is rich and long enough for us to be Muslims and know what jihad is.
Aslan Maskhadov
It is not advantageous for Russia in its present state to fight against Chechnya. The army is a mess. It must be made combat ready. That will take time. Russia has a lot of economic, social and political problems much more important than Chechnya.
I assure you, it would be much more pleasant for me to be an ordinary voter in peaceful Chechnya than the president of a republic at war.
You have no right to criticise Russia over Chechnya.
Thousands of mercenaries, who have trained in camps on the territory of Chechnya as well as come in from abroad, are actually preparing to impose extremist ideas on the whole world.
We want peace and a political solution to the situation in Chechnya.
Despite egregious human rights abuses, military dictatorship in Greece, and Russian atrocities in Chechnya, no state has ever been voted out of the Council of Europe.
Chechnya was part of that whole wave of entities of the Soviet Union that had a very separate sense of identity, of political and social history, that set them apart from the rest of Russia.
Everybody used to talk about Chechnya as a place, in the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, that was essentially governed by extended family and regional networks that substituted for older clan structures. But those networks have been destroyed.
The capital city of Grozny in Chechnya was reduced completely to rubble, and Putin thought this was worthwhile because it kept the state together.
The refugee problem is definitely a disaster for the entire region. Putin - the refugee problem in Chechnya was largely contained inside of Russia itself although there were tens of thousands of Chechens who sought refuge across Europe. Putin wasn't swayed by that issue when it came to Chechnya.
People in Washington, D.C., may not be paying that much attention to what's happening in Chechnya, but people in Riyadh and Amman and elsewhere are.
For Putin, Syria is all too reminiscent of Chechnya. Both conflicts pitted the state against disparate and leaderless opposition forces, which over time came to include extremist Sunni Islamist groups.
Putin's treatment of Chechnya became a cautionary tale of what would happen to rebels and terrorists - and indeed to entire groups of people - if they threatened the Russian state.
Being independent caused us nothing but trouble. I do not want Chechnya to be independent from Russia.
Bulk collection of phone records didn't find or stop the Tsarnaev brothers from the massacre in Boston. In fact, one might argue that all of the money spent on bulk collection takes money away from human analysts that might have noticed the older brother's trip to become radicalized in Chechnya.
I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.
The history of Chechnya is one of imperialism gone terribly wrong. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Chechens were among the few peoples to fend off Mongol conquerors, but at a terrible cost. Turks, Persians, and Russians sought to seize Chechnya, and it was finally absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1859.
Other places are also generators of far-flung violence beyond their own borders - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are obvious examples - but none has as long a history of war, resistance, and terror as Chechnya.
In 1995, Russia virtually gave Chechnya de facto statehood and independence even though, de jure, it didn't recognize Chechnya as an independent state. And I would like to emphasize strongly that Russia withdrew all of its troops, we moved the prosecutors, we moved all the police, dismantled all the courts, completely, 100 percent.
Yes, life in Chechnya so far looks more like a life after a natural disaster.
The Chechnya problem is a centuries-old problem. The thing is that today, fundamentalists and terrorists are exploiting those centuries-old problems to accomplish their own objectives that have nothing to do whatsoever with the interests of Chechnya.
I'm sure corruption in Chechnya is minimal.
Chechnya is part and parcel of the Russian Federation.
