Seriously, the completely shameful behavior of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International in the Caucasus has made those organizations irrelevant in Russia. They left Chechnya in 1996, because their members kept getting kidnapped and killed by Chechen gangs. As a result, they breathed not one word about the horrific human rights violations at that time. The Russian Army is brutal, but they are nothing compared to Chechen warlords. Now, they lambast Russian conscripts from impoverished cities like Omsk and villages who were too poor to bribe their way out of the army or get an educational deferment, and don't say a damn thing about the Chechen slave trade, the numerous bombings, the torture, the beheadings, the ethnic cleansing of non-Chechens. They are cowards. This total silence on the part of those organizations is adduced by Russians as further evidence that they are CIA fronts and that Westerners think Russians are n-words and don't give a damn about Russian citizens getting kidnapped, enslaved, tortured, executed and blown up. I have no respect for Human Rights Watch any more. Complete hypocrites. I wouldn't give them the time of day.
My ex-girlfriend, who is a Russian journalist (used to edit the arts and entertainment section of a German-language newspaper in Moscow) got a call a while ago just out of the blue. It turned out it was the mother of a former colleague of hers, also a Russian journalist. He had been down in Chechnya covering the war and, predictably, got kidnapped and tortured to death. She wanted to talk to someone and just found my ex's card in her son's things and called her. She cried and cried.