I know how the Presidential Palace in Grozny feels…

I’ve been pretty absent on this blog for a while: a combination of a time-consuming side-project and an equally time-consuming completion of a book manuscript as well as generally life getting in the way, Still, the project is essentially over and the book — Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994-2009, for Osprey’s Essential Histories series — has been submitted, maps and all (though it is only scheduled to see the light of day in December 2014), so I am contemplating the prospect of not having to be working pretty much every hour available. Any day now, once I’ve caught up on the backlog of everything which didn’t get done before…