Beslan Siege/Now what? The failings of the once-feared Russian army have again been highlighted. Daniel McLaughlin examines the options facing President Putin in the troubled North Caucasus.
In the end, there was carnage and chaos. And through the gunfire, the explosions and the cries and screams of survivors and their relatives, the wreckage of the Kremlin's decade-old policy in Chechnya was clearly visible.
Desperate for a ratings boost and nagged by banditry and kidnappings in Chechnya, then president Mr Boris Yeltsin sent troops into the republic in 1994, confident in his advisers' promise that he would win a "small, victorious war" with its separatists.
Two years later they traipsed home, defeated, the outdated Russian army outmanoeuvred and outfought by a relatively small number of highly motivated guerrillas.
Mr Vladimir Putin succeeded Mr Yeltsin in 2000, on a promise to kill rebels "even in the outhouse". He has vowed never to negotiate with their leaders, and backs his troops to enforce a stillborn peace process fronted by handpicked politicians with little credibility in Chechnya.
A former KGB agent and chief of its successor, the FSB, Mr Putin pledged to submit Russia to a "dictatorship of the law", and deliver the kind of discipline and stability that the ailing and drink-loving Mr Yeltsin could not.
Now, six months after re-electing Mr Putin to the Kremlin, Russians can no longer believe his assertion that Chechnya's rebels are a spent force, and that peace is taking hold in a region that has periodically rebelled against Moscow's rule for 150 years.
The Kremlin's candidate won a rigged election to become Chechnya's new president last Sunday, after his predecessor was assassinated in May.
But he takes power amid an unprecedented show of strength by the guerrillas, who are blamed for blowing up two Russian airliners last Tuesday and sending a suicide-bomber to Moscow a week later, in attacks that killed 100 people.
Critics say that rather than admit failure in his struggle with local separatists, Mr Putin prefers to claim that he actually faces an enemy capable of attacking the most powerful targets: the same al-Qaeda-backed international terror network that has struck New York, Washington, Madrid and elsewhere.
Washington, fearing cracks in its anti-terror coalition, has backed Mr Putin's campaign in Chechnya, despite its lack of success and the dreadful rights record of his troops.
Organisations like Amnesty International, meanwhile, accuse Mr Putin of using the "war on terror" as a fig leaf to hide the fact that federal forces and their local militia allies kidnap, torture and murder Chechen civilians with impunity.
He has repeatedly linked Chechnya's rebels to Islamic extremism, and officials swiftly claimed yesterday that 10 of the hostage-takers killed in North Ossetia were Arabs, and that the operation was funded by Abu Omar As-Seyf, allegedly al-Qaeda's representative in Chechnya.
The separatist movement has fractured into feuding splinters over the last decade, with moderates deploring attacks on civilians and still calling for talks with Moscow while radicals probably do enjoy moral and financial support from "jihadist" groups abroad.
Terrorism experts play down the direct influence of al-Qaeda, however, noting that the rebels have never attacked a foreign target, despite their ability to strike in Moscow and now, apparently, onboard airliners.
Relatively few Chechens supported its declaration of independence from Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even fewer now back guerrillas whom rights groups accuse of terrorising civilians as mercilessly as do Russian troops.
But the lack of a peace process in the republic threatens to drive a generation of Chechens, who have grown up knowing only war, into the arms of extremist groups, who would love to get a foothold in a Caucasus region rich in oil and strategic possibility.
Mr Putin's desire for international support - or at least acquiescence - over Chechnya saw him appeal to the United Nations Security Council this week for its condemnation of the hostage-takers in the town of Beslan.
Russia's state-dominated media hailed a damning UN statement as justification of the Kremlin's hardline policy in Chechnya.
But Mr Putin's unexpected appeal to an international community that he has always shunned over Chechnya - insisting Moscow always knows best - may be seen abroad as an invitation to take a greater interest in a conflict that slipped off the global diplomatic agenda years ago.
Russia's ambassador to the UN may not feel as triumphant as he did this week, if and when the countries that supported him over events in Beslan ask what Moscow now intends to do - other than send in more troops and hold occasional, rigged elections - to bring a real and lasting peace to Chechnya.
As gangs of North Ossetian men wielding Kalashnikov rifles hunted for the fleeing hostage-takers last night, security officials glimpsed a nightmare scenario that Mr Putin himself warned of this week.
"What is happening in North Ossetia is horrible," he said. "Horrible not only because some of the hostages are children but because this action could destroy the already fragile balance of multi-faith and multi-ethnic relations in the region."
Caucasus analysts say they fear that the death of many local women and children in the siege could ignite fighting between Christian Ossetians and their Muslim neighbours, the Chechens and Ingush.
The Ingush fought a brief but bitter war with the Ossetians after the collapse of the Soviet Union, forcing many Ingush to flee the town of Vladikavkaz and leave their homes and property behind; many old scores remain to be settled, and guns are cheap and plentiful in the region.
Ingushetia - run by an authoritarian ally of Mr Putin - is already a trouble spot for the Kremlin, after rebels seized the local capital for a night in June and killed dozens of police and soldiers, before most melted across the border into Chechnya or back into the civilian community.
Since the first Chechen war began, heavily armed guerrillas have been able to move with relative ease around the North Caucasus, even after major raids, by outmanoeuvring Russian troops or simply bribing them at checkpoints.
The few crises in Mr Putin's rule have all highlighted the failings of the once-feared Russian army. In August 2000, he was lambasted for his slow response to the sinking of the Kursk submarine, when a faulty torpedo exploded and all 118 men on board died.
In October 2002, more than 120 people died when special forces used a secret gas to knock out Chechen rebels who had besieged a Moscow theatre.
Then, as yesterday, the military and rescue operation was woeful considering the amount of time the authorities had to prepare for the worst.
In Beslan, as they did after the theatre siege two years ago, Russians were left wondering why ambulances and fire services took so long to reach injured hostages as the security services struggled to control the situation.
Mr Putin's popularity, stoked by slavish state-run television and the absence of real political opposition, survived the Kursk disaster and the theatre siege.
It will survive the horror of Beslan - burnished by pledges of Russia's key role in the US-led "war on terror" - but it will not bring peace to Chechnya.
Mr Putin's political raison d'être - to restore order and dignity to a fallen superpower - does not allow him to talk to the rebels, and he now has something approaching carte blanche from Washington to deal with them however he likes.
But force alone cannot beat the guerrillas and, as the darkest pages of Mr Putin's presidency prove, the Russian military is utterly incapable of vanquishing its fiercest foe.