Russia Armed Forces Personnel

They flew flimsy wood-and-canvas planes into hails of deadly flak and wore no parachutes. They preferred to commit suicide by crashing rather than be taken as POWs. Their German enemies dubbed the daredevil female Soviet pilots the Nachthexen: the Night Witches. For Russians, May 9--Victory Day, marking the defeat of the Nazis in World War II--is the most glorious holiday, when memories of the nation's past as a great power are revived.

They flew flimsy wood-and-canvas planes into hails of deadly flak and wore no parachutes. They preferred to commit suicide by crashing rather than be taken as POWs. Their German enemies dubbed the daredevil female Soviet pilots the Nachthexen: the Night Witches. For Russians, May 9--Victory Day, marking the defeat of the Nazis in World War II--is the most glorious holiday, when memories of the nation's past as a great power are revived.

A second trapped sailor on the doomed Kursk submarine left behind a note, Russian officials disclosed Wednesday, but the revelation raised more questions than it answered. In contrast to the release of the first note, officials didn't say which of the crew members wrote the second missive or when it was recovered. They also didn't explain why officials waited at least several days and perhaps more than a week to reveal the discovery.

It wasn't exactly the homecoming Lyubov Tumayeva wanted. But more than six years after her son Sergei left for war, it was the best homecoming she could hope for. "At least now he will be close by," she said Monday, when she laid Sergei's remains to rest in his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, about 250 miles east of Moscow. "Now I will be able to visit his grave, and there will be a place where I can have a cry."

As street fighting raged Thursday for control of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, rebel commanders in the separatist republic announced that they had captured a Russian general who had been supervising the army's assault on the city. The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that Gen. Mikhail Malofeyev had been missing since Tuesday, when he and a group of soldiers were caught in an ambush in Grozny. Russian officials said they didn't know if the general had been captured or killed.

It was the middle of the night when Alexander Kuzminykh, a 19-year-old sailor, attacked a sentry aboard the nuclear submarine Vepr and killed him with a chisel. Grabbing the guard's AK-47 assault rifle, the sailor then killed seven other crew members and locked himself in a torpedo bay. For 20 hours, the disturbed teenager held control of the submarine at a naval base near Murmansk last month.

A Russian sailor who barricaded himself inside a nuclear-powered submarine after gunning down eight crew members killed himself when security officers stormed his hiding place in the torpedo compartment, officials said. The Defense Ministry press office said Alexander Kuzminykh, 19, committed suicide during the security operation, the Interfax and Itar-Tass news agencies reported.

Two Russian servicemen died when suicide bombers blew up a truck packed with explosives outside a Russian facility in Chechnya on Wednesday and rebels raked the area with gunfire after the blast, a Kremlin spokesman said. The two bombers, a man and a woman, "were blown to bits" and five Russians were wounded, Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, the Kremlin's top spokesman for Chechnya, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Rebels holding out in Chechnya's southern mountains shot down a Russian helicopter that was targeting the militants' last strongholds, killing 15 troops, Russia's interior minister said Saturday. The Russians have squeezed the Chechens into a few regions in the breakaway republic's rugged south and concentrated air and artillery fire Saturday on the Argun and Vedeno gorges.

Four Russian soldiers were killed when rebel fighters ambushed a military unit in central Chechnya in the second attack on a convoy in two days, an official said Saturday. The convoy was fired upon Friday while moving through the Vedeno Gorge, a region that has seen heavy rebel activity since the start of the war in the separatist republic, according to an official with the pro-Russian civilian government in Chechnya.

Russian divers who worked to retrieve victims of the sunken Kursk submarine spoke publicly for the first time about the grim task of pulling bodies of men from the wreckage, newspapers reported Tuesday. All 118 crewmen died when the nuclear-powered submarine sank Aug. 12 after being torn apart by two explosions and a fire. "This was not our first work with drowned bodies . . .

A second trapped sailor on the doomed Kursk submarine left behind a note, Russian officials disclosed Wednesday, but the revelation raised more questions than it answered. In contrast to the release of the first note, officials didn't say which of the crew members wrote the second missive or when it was recovered. They also didn't explain why officials waited at least several days and perhaps more than a week to reveal the discovery.

After millions of dollars, multitudes of storms and 12 recovered bodies, Russia on Tuesday ended its risky diving operation to retrieve the rest of the remains of the 118 sailors who died when the nuclear submarine Kursk exploded and sank nearly three months ago. "The divers said they had done everything possible for the Kursk, and more," said Northern Fleet spokesman Vladimir Navrotsky.

"Mustn't despair." These words from Lt. Capt. Dmitry Kolesnikov's note, scribbled in the dark inside the sunken submarine Kursk, were displayed in a black frame Thursday next to his flag-draped coffin. Funeral services for Kolesnikov, one of 12 sailors whose bodies have been recovered from the wreck by deep-sea divers, were held in his hometown of St. Petersburg. The recovery of the note helped revive public criticism over the military's slow response to the Aug.

Venturing farther inside the sunken Kursk nuclear submarine, divers recovered more bodies Sunday from amid the jagged metal and silt that fill the wreck in the Barents Sea. The number and identity of the bodies remained unclear, Russian officials said, apparently because the remains were badly damaged. All 118 men on the Kursk were killed after an explosion crippled it Aug. 12.

Dmitry Kolesnikov began life with a legacy of the sea. He ended it upholding the sea's traditions. Huddled in the cramped aft section of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, with death closing in on him and his men, Kolesnikov began to take notes, as if in a logbook. And he did it in strict maritime fashion, starting and ending with the time. By the end, the light was failing along with his strength. "I'm writing blindly," he scrawled finally.

The Spartan apartments of the Mamulino military housing complex hardly qualify as luxurious even in destitute Russia, but they have become hot properties in a country with an army of homeless soldiers. And despite the best intentions of the German government that bankrolled the project, distribution of the coveted homes has fallen victim to the same labyrinthine network of favor-trading, influence-peddling, connections and caprice that dictates the sharing of wealth throughout Russia.

An outspoken naval journalist who exposed the Russian navy's dumping of nuclear waste in the Pacific was put on trial for treason Thursday in what his backers charge is a politically motivated attempt to silence him. The Russian government, increasingly using secrecy laws to protect the military from embarrassing revelations, has charged navy Capt. Grigory Pasko with selling classified defense information to an undisclosed foreign country. Pasko's trial parallels the case of former navy Capt.

They were alive. At least some of them. At least for a while. One of the first bodies recovered from the sunken Russian submarine Kursk on Thursday had a note tucked in the pocket, navy officials said. And with its scribbled, businesslike lines, it reawakened all the pain and shame of last summer's nuclear submarine disaster. "There are 23 people here," wrote Lt. Capt.

Russian divers gingerly entered the wreckage of the shattered submarine Kursk on Wednesday and retrieved the first of what they hope will be dozens of bodies of the 118 sailors who perished in the naval debacle in August. "I would refrain from calling it a success. Success is something that gives you joy and makes you happy," said Vladimir Navrotsky, head of the press center for Russia's Northern Fleet. "I would simply say that what we have achieved today is a considerable result."