The broken and burned bodies of children had just been pulled from the wreckage of a small-town school. All Russia was in mourning. And President Vladimir Putin was quietly furious. Over tea and cakes at his country retreat, he kept a group of visitors past midnight last week, intent on making them understand why the long-running war in Chechnya had triggered the bloodbath in nearby Beslan. The war was not his fault, he said, but the failure of "weak leaders" in the 1990s and mistakes that "I would not have made." "No one," he added insistently, "can blame us for inflexibility with the people of Chechnya." For Putin, Chechnya has become a trap he cannot escape. In 1999, he promised Russians a two-week war that would crush the separatist enemy. Instead, he has given them an endless struggle that haunts his presidency, a guerrilla conflict generating a wave of terrorism that has killed about 450 people in the last month and 1,000 over two years. In private, according to people who have spoken with him, the normally cool former KGB officer rails in frustration at his inability to halt the violence and responds with seething anger to those who question his approach. While he portrays his policy as flexible, a review of the last five years shows that Putin never really wavered from the tough, no-compromise course he set in 1999 as prime minister when he vowed to "wipe them out in the outhouse." Every time he flirted with new approaches, according to interviews with politicians, analysts and presidential advisers, Putin would turn back to the same formula.