The European Union’s leaders travel next month to Khanty-Mansiysk for a summit with Dmitry Medvedev, the new Russian president. Will they find time, I wonder, in this booming western Siberian oil town to stop off at the crossroads of Sverdlova and Pionerskaya streets? They should do. There, in front of School No. 5, they will find a recently erected memorial to the victims of Stalin’s repressions - at least, so the town’s government website says.

The existence of this memorial reminds us to think twice before rushing to judge today’s Russia. The country clearly moved to a more authoritarian, centralised form of rule under Vladimir Putin, and civil liberties were curtailed. But many Russians remain as determined as ever to expose the truth about their country’s bloodstained communist past. These days, Stalin cannot be airbrushed from Russia’s history as easily as he used to airbrush his opponents.

Putin’s reordering of Russia and his revival of its great power foreign policy ambitions contributed to a downturn in EU-Russian relations, but none of that makes Russia a monotonal society. As EU enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn said in a thoughtful speech last week: “The rise of the middle class and entrepreneurs in Russia should eventually mean growing demands for property rights and, by extension, legal certainty. This internal dynamic may lead Russia to reform its legal system and make its political system more accountable - but this is certainly not an automatic process by any means.”

Russia’s leaders at present can hardly be said to share the EU’s core values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. But neither do other countries important to Europe, including, for example, most of its neighbours on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. As with these neighbours, so with Russia - there’s little choice but to try to improve relations. 

It would be wrong to kick Russia out of the G8, as John McCain suggested in March - even if that were possible. Rather, the EU and the US should be hard-headed but practical in its dealings with Russia and, above all, recognise that relations with Moscow tend to be at their most difficult when western countries themselves are disunited.

“Experience shows that Russia respects the EU when we are able to adopt united positions, and act accordingly. Conversely, Russia is adept at exploiting disunity among member-states,” David Milliband and Bernard Kouchner, the UK foreign secretary and French foreign minister, wrote in a joint letter in March to the EU’s Slovenian presidency.

All too true. But the Khanty-Mansiysk summit will show whether these wise words were just that - words.

According to a joke doing the rounds in Brussels, two Eurocrats are discussing the EU’s Russia policy. “ I wonder what are things going to be like after President Putin,” says one. “Hard to say,” replies the other. “A lot will depend on the new prime minister.”The new prime minister will, of course, be none other than Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president for the past eight years.

To some, that suggests little immediate change in the truculent tone of Russia’s dealings with the EU over recent years. Putin himself told German chancellor Angela Merkel last Saturday that Dmitry Medvedev, his hand-picked successor, would defend Russia’s interests just as strongly as he has done.

For many in Brussels and other EU capitals, trained as they are to think of nationalism as a Bad Thing, shudders surely went up their spines when they heard Putin describe Medvedev as “no less a nationalist – in the good sense of the word – than I am”.Still, Medvedev is no more a Putin clone than Putin was a clone of Boris Yeltsin. It is my belief that, after a certain spell of time, we will see a difference in Russian policies – starting with domestic matters such as state administration, economic innovation and social policy, and gradually extending to Russia’s role on the world stage.

It should come as no surprise that Putin played up Medvedev’s tough qualities. I vividly recall being in Moscow in 1985 when Andrei Gromyko, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, recommended Mikhail Gorbachev for the Communist Party leadership after Konstantin Chernenko’s death. “Comrades,” Gromyko said of Gorbachev, “this man has a nice smile but he has teeth of iron.”This is not to say that Medvedev is a closet liberal whose heartfelt wish is to emulate Gorbachev.

Do not forget that, for many Russians, the Gorbachev era is remembered as a time not only of new and exciting freedoms and the end of the Cold War, but of economic chaos, food shortages, a totally misconceived anti-alcohol campaign, rising nationalism, violent separatism, public disorder and, in the end, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Medvedev will take lessons from that experience just as much as from the corruption and continuing economic upheavals of the Yeltsin era. As chairman of Gazprom, he can hardly be unaware that Russia’s economic revival under Putin owes almost everything to a bonanza in oil and gas revenues, and little to modernisation and innovation in Russia’s industrial and service sectors.

All this supports the argument that Medvedev will introduce changes – to the Russian economy, to the Russian state’s treatment of its citizens, and in time perhaps to Russian foreign policy. But he will do it in his own, very personal, very Russian way.

Diplomats are brought up on charm and courtesy like babies on milk. So it’s always a pleasure to listen to one whose formative years must have involved a certain familiarity with chilli and Tabasco. Meet Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s energetic and forceful ambassador to the European Union.

At a conference this week of the Friends of Europe think-tank, one speaker after another voiced concern about Russia’s resurgence as a world power under Vladimir Putin. The EU needed to strengthen its institutions so that Europe could speak with one voice in foreign policy, not least to Russia, they said.

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Whatever one thinks of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, its hardnosed diplomacy has traditionally got results when dealing with the bickering European Union member states. Divide and rule has been a successful policy, culminating in Germany’s decision to help build a gas pipeline that would bypass Poland and the Baltic states. Now, however, Moscow seems to be engaged in scattergun attacks on EU countries – which could rebound on it.

This week it crossed two of its traditional supporters in the bloc: Italy and Sweden.

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