Chechnya is a small republic in the Caucasus Mountains, south of Russia and north of Georgia. About a million people live there. The capital is Grozny. Most people are Muslim. On paper it belongs to the Russian Federation. In 1991 it announced it was an independent country, and that led to long, bitter wars with Russia. Some Chechen fighters later carried out attacks in Russian cities. Though actually, English news still sometimes says 'a country' as a shorthand, but it is not a fully separate state in the way a student might picture; Moscow still claims it, and the wars were about that claim. The people and the language are called Chechen, not Chechnya.