(RFE/RL) -- Russian Deputy Interior Minister Colonel General Arkady Yedelev recently announced his latest estimates for the number of resistance fighters still active in Chechnya: 450, subdivided into 37 separate groups. Those figures, provided during a press conference in Grozny on March 19, contradict earlier statistics cited by the Russian military and Interior Ministry. They also differ from estimates from the Chechen resistance leadership, which admits that not all groups of fighters are still under its direct control.
Yedelev's figure of 37 militant bands is down from his estimate of just six weeks earlier: "Rossiiskaya gazeta" on February 2 published an interview with him in which he gave the same total -- 450 men -- but estimated the number of individual groups at 46. Two months before that, the resistance website kavkazcenter.com cited Colonel General Nikolai Rogozhkin, commander of the Interior Ministry forces, as estimating the number of Chechen resistance fighters at between 800-1,000.
The days when the North Caucasus resistance constituted a unified force that coordinated its activities with the Chechen War Council appear to be over. And in early November 2006, the commander of the Group of Federal Forces in the North Caucasus, Colonel General Yevgeny Baryayev, was cited by kommersant.ru as providing a figure of 700. |