"Well, glad to hear that is now over."

It isn't exactly over, and "glad" a word that doesn't really belong in a situation like this. Current figure for deaths among hostages is 90 and expected to rise, given the number seriously injured in hospital. Their chances of survival isn't improved by the refusal of the authorities to let the doctors know what the gas used was.

Nothing can justify this kind of hostage taking, but its worth understanding some of things that have led up to it. The background to this is a brutal, near genocidal, war launched by Russia, in breach of a peace settlement in a previous successful war of indepedence. The grounds for the new war were a series of terrorist atrocities against Russian civilians which there are very good grounds for believing were carried out by the Russian authorities as part of Putin's successful bid to become elected President. Essentially it was warmaking as an electoral stunt.

The nightmare is that it's starting to seem that atrocities are having to be bigger and bigger in order to get media attention.

The only sane thing to have done would have been for Moscow to preempt the whole thing by accepting the right of Chechnya to secede the same way places like Georgia, Lithuania and all the rest were able to secede. But no, power politics didn't allow that because technically, unlike those countries, Chechnya was part of Russia rather than a theoretically separate state within the Soviet Union.

Crazy.