My name is Maria, and I’m addicted to war. I had my first taste of combat shortly after I turned 23, in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. From then on, war was my constant companion, friend and spiritual adviser.

Critics claim journalists go too far – and, sometimes, not far enough.
Since Sept. 11, American journalists have been walking a fine ethical line.
On the one hand, there are grim warnings about spilling military secrets, undermining national [...]

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan –  Private Pavel Mikheyev will never know what hit him. Walking home throughthe town of Kurgan-Tyube, in Tajikistan, last week, the Russian soldier was caught in [...]

NAZRAN, Russia — Ingushetia has a lot of problems. The war with nearby North Ossetia, a troubled relationship with overlords in Moscow, run-away slaves.
According to newspaper accounts and television programmes in Russia and Ossetia, Russians are tricked [...]

NAURSKAYA, Russia — Legend has it that in 1774 the women and children of Naurskaya fought off an attack by the Turks, armed only with pitchforks and pots of hot soup.

As Cossacks, Russian warrior-farmers, it was their duty under the Tsars to defend Christian Russia’s expanding southern borders against Moslem Tatars and Turks.
Article originally published [...]

Legend has it that in 1774 the women and children ofNaurskaya fought off an attack by the Turks, armed only with pitchforks and pots of hot soup.

NAZRAN, Russia, Feb 28 — Preliminary poll results on Monday showed that General Ruslan Aushev was headed for re-election as president of the volatile southern Russian republic of Ingushetia.
Opponents accused Aushev, whose army of uniformed police patrolled the [...]

QERVEND, Azerbaijan - Six months ago Azerbaijan’s army suffered defeats so monumental that the president fled the country and a fifth of the Transcausasian republic ended up in enemy hands. Critics from all sides castigated the military [...]

On the other side of the electrified barbed-wire fence is a mine field, a couple of hundred yards of brush, the Pyanj river, and Afghanistan. All along the 620-mile border, Russian soldiers peer nervously through binoculars and night scopes, from observation towers, out of trenches, and from behind artillery equipment.

JIKHASKARI, Georgia –  By all accounts, Georgia’s first democratically-elected post-Soviet president is dead and buried near the west Georgian village of Jikhaskari.
But Zviad Gamsakhurdia isn’t about to let a little [...]