Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Chechen Republic is situated in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe, between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. It shares land borders with Georgia to the south, and with the Russian republics of Dagestan, Ingushetia, and North Ossetia-Alania to its east, north, and west, as well as Stavropol Krai to its northwest. The republic covers an area of 16,500 square kilometers.
During Operation Lentil in 1944, the entire Chechen and Ingush nations, totaling 496,460 people, were forcibly deported to the Kazakh SSR on charges of collaborating with Nazi Germany, charges later shown to be largely fabricated. Over 60 percent of the deported Chechen and Ingush populations perished. In 2004, the European Parliament recognized the deportation as an act of genocide.
The First Chechen War, which ran from 1994 to 1996, ended when Russian president Boris Yeltsin declared a ceasefire after Chechen rebel forces led by Aslan Maskhadov retook Grozny. A peace treaty was signed and Russian troops withdrew. Parliamentary and presidential elections in January 1997 brought Maskhadov to power for a five-year term.
Ramzan Kadyrov is the son of Akhmad Kadyrov, the former Ichkerian mufti who switched allegiance to Moscow and was elected Chechen president in 2003 before being assassinated on the 9th of May 2004. Ramzan, who had run his father's security force, became caretaker prime minister in 2005 and was appointed president in 2007. He has governed since, with his administration documented for corruption, torture, and what Freedom House called in 2009 one of the most repressive societies in the world.
According to the 2021 census, Chechnya's population is 1,510,824. Chechens make up 96.4 percent of residents, numbering 1,456,792. Russians account for 1.2 percent at 18,225 people, down from 296,794 in the 1959 census when they were the largest single group at 49.4 percent.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Freedom House have documented systematic torture, kidnappings, and extrajudicial killings in Chechnya. In 2017, Novaya Gazeta reported that at least 27 people were extrajudicially executed on the night of the 26th of January 2017. Reports from the same period described concentration camps in the town of Argun where gay men were detained and subjected to violence, which a 2021 Council of Europe report called the single most egregious example of violence against LGBTI people in Europe in decades.