Zaindi Choltaev, a Chechen political activist, is a member of the Parliamentary Assembly Council of Europe (PACE) - State Duma Joint Working Group for Chechen Settlement, and assists with the coordinating council of the Peace Mission in the Northern Caucasus. In 1992, he served as the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Chechen Republic, and from 1994-1995, was Chair of the Administration in the Provisional State Council of the Chechen Republic. In 1996, he resigned from the Chechen government, citing his disagreement with its domestic and foreign policies involving human rights violations, and refused to participate in the elections of that year. Choltaev later rejected an offer to join the Administration of the Chechen Republic created by the Russian government in 2000. He spent the academic year 2002 to 2003 in Washington as the visiting Galina Starovoitova Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies.