So don't tell me what you wouldn't do. What would you do?
I would have supported Aleksandr Dzasokhov as he was the one that brokered the release of 26 women and children before the FSB took over. I am not a hostage negotiator by trade, but I know good results when I see them.
Just like anybody can critique a movie, a piece of artwork, or a faulty church docuмent, based on principle alone without actively needing to have made a single work in those respective fields.
Your timeline only mentions "Russian specialist forces move in" at 1:10 PM on September 3rd. It failed to mention the use of these on the school which led to the fire and collapse of the sports hall, where most of the deaths took place:
The presence of the FSB was ominous. Essentially there were two teams operating, one on the federal level and one at the local level. Once the FSB took over, the local one had no real authority. Dzasokhov had the safety of the hostages at the top of his list, Putin did not. So first step through last step: Let Dzasokhov direct the negotiations. Do not invite the FSB.
From the website
http://www.pravdabeslana.ru/dunlop.htm:
Summing up Putin’s Role in the Beslan Tragedy: On 1 September 2004, Putin, who had been vacationing on the Black Sea at the resort town of Sochi, returned by plane to Moscow after learning of the hostage-taking incident. Immediately upon his arrival at the airport in Moscow, he held a meeting with the head of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), Rashid Nurgaliev, with the prosecutor general Vladimir Ustinov, with the director of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, and with the first deputy director of the FSB and commander of the Russian border-guards, Vladimir Pronichev.50 The presence of General Pronichev at this meeting was particularly significant. It was he who had overseen the storming of a theater building at Dubrovka in Moscow in October 2002 in which 174 hostages had perished from the effects of a special gas employed by the FSB.51
Following this meeting with his power ministers, Putin, at about noon on the first, placed a call on a special phone to the president of North Ossetia, Aleksandr Dzasokhov. Putin gave Dzasokhov “an [oral] command to hand over the organization of the counter-terrorist operation to the organs of the FSB.”52 This account, it should be noted, is in full accord with what Putin told Le Monde in the afore-mentioned interview published in the 1 June 2008 issue of the French newspaper. Putin manifestly had no intention of negotiating with the terrorists and outsourced the decision concerning how and when to storm the school to the FSB and, in particular, to the FSB spetsnaz (special forces) under the command of General Aleksandr Tikhonov. Putin then disappeared from public view until the morning of 4 September when the storming of the school had been completed.
In the end I have to agree with the "Voice of Breslan" in their assessment:
Putin’s confirmation that he had never intended to negotiate with the terrorists at Beslan drew an angry response from the members of the “Voice of Beslan” organization. “The death of 333 persons in the Beslan terrorist act,” they wrote, “testifies to the negligent attitude of Putin toward his official duties.” “Since in Beslan on 1-3 September,” they continued, “the power structures, subordinated to the president of the Russian Federation, committed a crime, refusing to engage in negotiations [with the terrorists] and making use of the army, by so doing they comprised a criminal association [soobshchestvo].” Putin, the Mothers declared, “together with the terrorists, disregarded the lives of children and adults and thus bears with them a responsibility for the deaths of people.” Accordingly, “Voice of Beslan” demanded that the Russian prime minister be summoned for questioning and that criminal charges be leveled against him according to eleven articles of the Russian Criminal Code. Among these articles there was “murder, committed in the exceeding of the limits of the necessary defense or in exceeding the measures needed to take into custody persons having committed a crime” (Article 108), and “the intentional causing harm to the health of persons in various degrees of gravity” (Articles 111. 112, 114 and 115), as well as “negligence.” (Article 282)39
This was a Waco-equivalent event for Russia and Putin in particular. He deserves all the criticism he gets for this.
By the way, remember journalist and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya? The same one murdered in 2006? Well, back on the first day of the Beslan hostage crisis, she got on the first flight she could find, intent on assisting with the negotiations. She was poisoned by a cup of tea she drank on the plane and nearly died. Another convenient development for Putin and his cronies!