If Chechen rebels are attacking police stations, and army posts, and municipal offices, then I agree with you. You have a case of nationalists fighting for their independence, or even just ordinary people fighting to get out from under the Russian boot.
If you have people murdering children by the hundreds, and focusing their attacks on civilian targets, as these people have over the last decade, if you have people supporting themselves by kidnapping and mayhem, with emphasis on mayhem, then you have a different kind of a problem.
This doesn't make Russians into saints, and I fully understand why anyone would want to get out from under Russian rule.
But the authors of Beslan, and the authors of the kinds of crimes typical of Chechen banditry, can not be given the safe haven of their own territory. They had their own territory, and they used it to launch more attacks. They did not use it to build a country, they used it to launch attacks against civilian targets in neighboring provinces.
That creates, then, a situation not unlike the West Bank, where the presence of psychos attacking civilian targets, and government troops rounding up civilians looking for the psychos, makes it impossible to live a normal life. People who want to raise their kids and live life have to leave. The people who remain are either complicit or doomed.
That's the first line of the article. Then it goes on to examine the root causes for the situation in Chechnya.
There, Putin and Russia are to blame in their failure to work toward a solution to the conflict. Instead, they've actually been profiteering from it.