A dangerous equation has taken shape in Russia. It is the equation of human and civil rights with western imperialism. In the last two to three years, President Vladimir Putin and is closest associates have:

• Squeezed much - not all - of the life out of the independent media;

• Clamped down on NGOs, especially those that receive much of their income from external (to Russia) organisations;

• Interpreted western support for democratic movements in Ukraine, Georgia and Central Asia as attempts to destabilise Russia itself.

An example from earlier this month: Internews, which employs some 60 Russians, specialising in training broadcast journalists and in acting as a clearing house for programmes for regional stations, has been closed down; its director has been informed she may be charged with fraud and money laundering - the latter carrying a 14-year jail sentence. Internews' training is directed at teaching journalists to be independent and fair.

Russia still lives on the goodwill engendered abroad by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin: both reviled in their country - as many citizens' reactions to Yeltsin's death a week ago showed. Add to that the continuing hope on the part of the democratic states that Russia can still be enfolded into their number and its importance as a supplier of energy, especially to Germany and elsewhere in Central Europe: these have militated against foreign leaders from voicing strong criticism - including of the murderous Chechen war, and its doleful aftermath.

They are beginning to be sharper: Dick Cheney gave a sharply critical speech earlier this year, and Angela Merkel's succession to the avidly pro-Russian Gerhard Schroeder (who took a chairmanship of the overseas business of Russia's Gasprom when he left office) made Germany less pliant. But the west remains transfixed before one who still talks like a reformer in the economic sphere - yet who increasingly fashions Russia into an authoritarian state.

Many elements drive this, including the greater clout the country gets from a high oil price. But as important is the psychology of the Putin circle: often drawn from the ranks of the KGB, the organisation which more than any other epitomised and benefited from the might and threat of the Soviet Union, they were bitter when the soviet Union collapsed. Putin had benefited from that collapse; from being an obscure lieutenant colonel stationed in a KGB centre in East Germany he rose to be deputy mayor of St Petersburg, then moved to Moscow in the last rackety years of Boris Yeltsin and was promoted rapidly through a series of posts until he became accepted by Yeltsin's more-than-rackety circle as the man who would serve them best as the next president.

He deeply disappointed them. Though he kept his promise not to open the books of the corruption around the Yeltsin family, he turned against the oligarchs - exiling two and jailing another, frightening the other into political impotence and at least semi-loyal silence.

This was popular: the oligarchs' seizure of much of what was of value in Russia was better than communism, but it didn't appear that way to those impoverished by the collapse of the state and the party. Even more popular was the extra resources pumped into wages, pensions and other services by the rising oil price; and by the reinvigoration of a patriotic narrative in the leadership.

Part of that narrative, and part of the bitterness at the heart of Putin and his circle, is that the west cheated Russia: that when it was down, western states ignored it and kicked it around; that they supported anti-Russian politicians in the former Soviet republics as well as anti-Putin politicians at home; that they lauded and paid for domestic critics in journalism and in NGOs.

At the core of this is a view that human and civil rights are merely instrumental: that the west cares little for them, but uses them to gain advantage. Increasingly these rights are seen not as values in themselves, but as pawns in a new war of position. The many Russian democrats, in the liberal political parties (which now cannot get enough votes to have deputies in parliament) and out of them, are disoriented and isolated.

The hard and irreducible fact is that Putin is popular. The windfall of the high oil price, regular wages, higher pensions and a consumer boom on the one hand, and a tough, Russian nationalist rhetoric, standing up to western states in a way and with a style which both Gorbachev and Yeltsin eschewed, has given him a political base of great strength.

In the long run, however, Russia will decline. Energy prices will go down; alternative sources of energy will displace the strategic position of all oil producers - and Russia will be left with what it now has, but disguises: a rapidly shrinking population, a largely un-modernised industrial base, huge infrastructure and health problems, vastly bloated bureaucracies, inefficient armed forces and centralised, semi-authoritarian politics.

The generation now in power is still that which did well out of the Soviet Union; and the Russian people, shorn suddenly of an empire which was also an economic system and a great power, still have to adjust to post imperial realities. The underlying reality is that Russia's future is with Europe: that the healthiest part of its politics and culture draw it towards countries which it has dominated or threatened, but with which it must now cooperate.