I found this commentary on the Russia vs. Chechnya on Metafliter quite interesting, and very close to what I feel about the situation. Notice that as a Russian I can hardly be objective — it is hard to be objective when a car bomb explodes a few blocks from where one lives. Rage can easily consume even the stronger ones when they see children taken hostage, dying, shot in their backs.
Yet I cannot justify whatever has been happening in Chechnya in the past 10 years: betrayals, greed, incompetence — all combined to produce atrocities of Chechen war.
There was a very good (I think) documentary shown on RENTV (one of Russian independent TV stations) last week. For those reading in Russian — a link above should be useful. I am guessing that the film should be available somewhere on P2P, though I have not been looking for it specifically. Again, it may not be perfectly objective, especially the last 2 installments of it, but it does give a terrible historical perspective of what has happened and why…