Please Live : The Chechen Wars, My Mother and Me

'Please live' were the last words fifteen-year-old Lana said to her mother. Shortly afterwards Natalia Estemirova was kidnapped outside their apartment block in Grozny, Chechnya.On 15th July 2009, she was murdered for telling the truth.A mountainous sliver of land which creates a natural boundary between Europe and Asia, for centuries Chechnya had been a sharp bone in Russia's throat.Three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, frustrated by the continued presence of the independence movement within Chechnya, Russia invaded. It was a war of extraordinary brutality. It turned Lana's mother, Natalia Estemirova, from a teacher into a human rights investigator.She became a dedicated member of Memorial, intent on exposing the kidnappings, bombings, torture and murders committed by Russian forces and Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed Chechen President.Natalia Estemirova's life, assassination, and the impunity that followed it, tell the story of Putin's Russia.This is Lana's story of