You can barely move these days for images of a malignant and terrifying Russia, whether it be the forlorn face of Alexander Litvinenko dying a lonely death from polonium poisoning in a London hospital, Vladimir Putin in full spy garb adorning the cover of The Economist, or Viggo Mortensen posing as a vicious Russian mobster in David Cronenberg’s latest thriller. The question I am now most often asked when talking about Russia is not "how is Russia developing?", but "how concerned should we be?" Russia now has ever increasing economic, political and military power. How real, then, are the concerns of a new Cold War that are now prevalent everywhere in our media?

In a nutshell, we are right to be concerned, and no-one can now seriously pretend that modern Russia is an easy, predictable and thoroughly reliable international partner. But it is a long way short of being an ‘enemy’, as it was during the Cold War, and avoiding Russia becoming such an enemy depends almost as much on us as it does on Russia itself.

At the very least, modern Russia has a serious image problem. Whilst this image problem says a lot about the hyperbolic and simplistic tendencies of the Western (and especially British) mass media, which increasingly portray Russia as a vicious, vengeful petro-state, it can’t be denied that there is no smoke without fire. Russia is a dangerous place for opposition politicians and media; it is an assertive and often non-constructive foreign policy actor (particularly towards its immediate neighbours); and corrupt money courses through its higher echelons. Russian leaders see themselves as European, but their attitude to European organizations from the OSCE to the EU is very semi-detached, seeking pivotal influence within the organizations without the obligations of membership.

Moreover, in their attitude to individual liberties and minority (particularly homosexual) rights, Russian leaders express ‘European’ values that the majority of decent Europeans would not recognize. Although some of the wilder theories circulating – that Putin himself orders the deaths of journalists and ex-KGB dissidents, and the bombing of his own citizens, for electoral purposes – are outlandish, the fact that the authorities’ participation in some of Russia’s most nefarious practices cannot be discounted entirely says much about the quality of political life in the country.

But this is still a long-way short of 'back to the USSR.' Although Putin’s popularity is massaged and manipulated, he has genuine support within Russia for giving the population much of what they want: economic growth, political stability, and domestic (if not yet international) esteem. The Russia Putin leaves behind is unquestionably a more confident and happier place than the country he inherited from Boris Yeltsin. It is also unquestionably less democratic, but then Yeltsin’s Russia was more a beacon of anarchism than consolidated democracy. Putin has consistently argued that democracy and political liberalism are important for Russia, but that Russia’s stability and economic growth are pre-requisites. This argument has a powerful logic and most of Russia’s citizens seem to agree.

Despite Europe’s much-reported energy dependence on Russia, in fact it is more a case of economic interdependence: the EU is Russia’s largest trading partner and Russia is the EU’s third biggest. Although most Russia-Western summits are increasingly frustrating and unproductive, it still means something that the US and Russian leaders can call each other friend in person, rather than something far less complimentary down a hotline.

Furthermore, Russia has a point on many international issues, with which it must be engaged and not simply dismissed. Take, for instance, its opposition to a new US missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. If the US had not unilaterally withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, Russia might trust it more. But even so, the Western media has been remarkably uncritical of the USA’s proposals. Are we really to believe that if Russia proposed to place missiles in Venezuela and declared they were aimed at defending its ally from North Korea, that the USA would accept this decision uncritically? After the demise of the last Cold War are we really prepared to countenance expensive re-armament in Europe so unresistingly? Isn’t this a real incentive towards a new arms race? Hasn’t Iraq taught us to be sceptical at the very least about our governments’ solutions to perceived terrorist threats? Russia’s claims of Western double standards ring truer when we compare the USA’s criticism of Russia with its cosying up to Kazakhstan, a regime whose leader-fixation Putin could only envy.

Moving out of this impasse will be tricky. For the foreseeable future Russia is unlikely to become a more friendly, more 'European' and less truculent political partner, and after Putin it may indeed move in the opposite direction. But Europe, and the West more generally, urgently need to come up with better policies that speak in a more co-ordinated, more robust but less condescending voice towards Russia.

Generally, there are three views of how to proceed towards Russia: a hawkish view (held, for example, by Dick Cheney, the US vice-president) which seeks to penalize Russia for its domestic and international transgressions to the extent of expelling it from international organizations; a pragmatic view that seeks engagement where it works, but holds out little hope of Russian improvement; and an idealistic view that seeks active engagement alongside a commitment to greater Russian democratization. None is ideal.

A hawkish approach may produce the very behaviour it intends to avoid - a resentful and isolated Russia. The pragmatic approach holds out few mechanisms for improving mutual relations and will simply ignore Russian bad conduct, and the idealistic approach may be considered patronizing and so can be counterproductive. However, the latter two approaches (or a combination of them) still offer engagement with Russia as a cornerstone of policy and the idealistic approach in particular involves a robust defence of European values that, however imperfectly applied in practice, have been the cornerstone of peace and growth for much of Europe since 1945.

It may be, however, that given the high-level political deadlock none of these approaches will work, and that the only solutions will be low-level initiatives on a case-by-case basis: increased economic relationships between medium and small-scale business, working visits between lower level officials (where are the exchanges between Russian and Scottish parliamentarians?), and increased educational exchange. Such measures, whilst hardly headline-grabbing, engage with Russia’s biggest political resource: its people, whom opinion polls regularly indicate are more European, more reflective, and more critical of their politicians than is often proclaimed. But we ourselves, in Scotland and in Europe more generally, can kick-start such a process, by looking beyond the headlines, and regarding Russians not as our eternal enemy, but as somewhat tentative partners who need to be encouraged, and not just cajoled.