Vladimir Putin’s people have said it is “silly” to suggest that the Russian president had anything to do with the murder by poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Silly? The fact that Putin and his agents are suspected of having had a hand in this murder is worry enough. If people think you did something, then they must think that you are capable of doing it.

Now Putin is the guest at a big meeting of EU leaders, and an embarrassing situation has been created. They can’t very well dis-invite him, because the suspicions may be just that – suspicions – and through his mouthpieces he has denied all involvement. But at the same time, those suspicions are there, and mutterings were made to the media about how Putin, when he meets with Europe’s leaders, will face “embarrassing questions” about Litvinenko’s death. But does he care? I think the Europeans may be making a little mistake in thinking that he might give a damn. The man is from Russia, for heaven’s sake, not from Stockholm. He’ll walk into that meeting without a qualm and without the slightest shred of shame. Meanwhile, the rest of them will fuss and fidget, tug at their ties, and adopt a “look here, are you sure you had nothing to do with this nasty business” stance, like members of some stiff club faced with the perplexing problem of what to do with a guest who has just spat at the waiter for serving him a cold meal.

Here we have a worldwide discussion about whether the President of one of the world’s richest and most powerful nations has ordered the murder of one of his many enemies, and Putin carries on unblinking. This shows us, more clearly than anything else that has happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Russia is different, a mysterious place in which the norms of law and democracy count for little, a Wild East to match the Wild West early days of pioneer America. The former Soviet satellite States have come on stream with the rest of democratic Europe, and are firmly entrenched in this normality as member States of the European Union. Yet Russia, which is not European to start with but straddles two continents and incorporates a hundred different cultures, is a world unto itself. It is a curiously closed world in which the President is suspected of being Lucrezia Borgia’s spiritual heir, and this is taken as an incontrovertible fact of life by those over whom he rules: the President might be murdering people, but they have no way of proving it, and no way of doing anything about it anyway, and besides, he denies it all.

The story is like something written by John Le Carre. A former Russian spy who obtained British citizenship only last month, after taking refuge in London from the virulence of the President and government he fiercely opposed and criticised, dies a slow and agonised death from a mysterious poison. The best of Britain’s doctors and poison specialists cannot work out what the lethal substance is, but have ruled out the heavy metal thallium and radiation. One of them says that the poison may never be identified. Meanwhile, friends of the dead man, who is pictured in the world’s media lying wan and hairless in the hospital’s intensive care unit, accuse “evil forces” in Russia of killing him as an act of revenge. The evil forces react by saying that it is silly to suggest that the Kremlin – for so many decades a byword for unutterable evil – has orchestrated any such plot.

This is the second time in just a few weeks that the Russian President and the Kremlin are facing such accusations. When Anna Politskaya was shot last month, it was widely mooted that Putin’s were the hands that pulled the strings that pulled the hands that pulled the trigger. Politskaya was one of the best-known journalists in Russia and one of the best-known Russian journalists in the world. Her chosen topic was what she called Russia’s “dirty war” in Chechnya. The world’s media had long since abandoned that story: Chechnya is too dangerous for foreign correspondents, the machinations are too complicated for readers and viewers to understand, and Chechnya itself is too obscure. Politskaya repeatedly challenged the Russian authorities about the suffering and inhumanity in Chechnya, receiving several international awards for her efforts, but only threats, arrests and an attempt at poisoning her in her own country. Russia, in its fondness for poison as an efficacious means for dispatching enemies, is akin to renaissance Italy in turning this into a black art. Let’s not forget the rapid dispatch to the afterlife of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who was pricked by the tip of a poison dart embedded in the point of an umbrella, while crossing Waterloo Bridge in 1978. That was straight out of John Le Carre, too.

Politskaya was not the first Russian journalist to be murdered in politically tainted circumstances since Vladimir Putin came to power six years ago. All of these crimes have, of course, remained unsolved. Who in the police force would dare investigate them or, having started the investigations, pursue them further and risk his own life? Risking your job and your income is one thing; risking your life quite another. Some of these murders have been linked to the interests of the Russian mafia and the oligarchs who made their money by seizing State assets when communism fell, in true Wild East fashion.

The difference with Politskaya’s murder is that there was no attempt at hiding why or how it was done, or to disguise it as a mugging. She was shot in the lift of the apartment block where she lived, in broad daylight, and the gun used to kill her was left alongside her body where it fell. This is standard Russian hit-man practice, but here’s the rub. She never spoke or wrote about the mafia, the oligarchs or provincial crooked businessmen. Almost the sole target of her criticism was Vladimir Putin and his people.

It wasn’t just Politskaya who died that day. The murder was not carried out to silence only her, but also anyone else who might even think of doing the same thing, and being highly vocal in opposition to Putin and friends. Even if he had nothing to do with the murder, the fact that plenty of people think he does is enough to win perfect silence. As The Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote after the murder: “As Russian (and Eastern European) history well demonstrates, it isn’t always necessary to kill millions of people to frighten all the others. A few choice assassinations, in the right time and place, usually suffice. Since the arrest of oil magnate Mikhail Khordorkovsky in 2003, no other Russian oligarchs have attempted even to sound politically independent. After the assassination of Politskaya, it’s hard to imagine many Russian journalists following in her footsteps to Grozny, either.”

Mikhail Khordorkovsky – now there was another bad case, and Putin’s name was being dragged around in the mud on that one, too. If you want to get rid of a political opponent, whip up some charges against him, rush the trial through, and sentence him to long years of hard labour in a Siberian work camp (yes, they still exist, decades after the death of Solzhenitsen).

There’s already a website up and running that displays photographs and details of “enemies of the people” – Russian journalists and human rights activists. Above each photograph, the year of birth is listed, and beneath it, a blank space waiting for the year of death.

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While Iraq and Iran loom large in European and North American consciousness, Russia fades into the background – a huge unknown mass, impossible to fathom and not even worth thinking about. There’s also the strange assumption that, since the end of the Cold War and the integration of former Iron Curtain peoples into mainstream democracy, Russia is now “one of us”. But Russia is no such thing. It is not Hungary or the Czech Republic. It is not even Bulgaria or Romania. It is still very much “them”. It is a place where ethnic minorities are persecuted, people are tortured, the press is silenced not by repressive laws but by the far more effective means of shooting journalists, the President is suspected of committing heinous crimes against democracy and human life, and meanwhile, Europe grows ever more dependent on Russian oil and gas.

The Cold War may have ended, but Russia remains a place straight out of a 1970s novel of espionage, murderous skulduggery and the evil conflation of corrupt political interests with those of snatch-and-grab oligarchs, whose greed is rivalled only by their absolute amorality. A cliché or a caricature this might be, but no news that comes out of Russia these days does anything to dispatch that view to oblivion.

Iran and Iraq are frightening to Europeans because of their extreme religious interpretation of morality, which is in direct conflict with the humanist morality of European culture. Russia, on the other hand, is disturbing because it seems to have no morality at all. We find ourselves confronted with an amoral State – rather than an immoral one like China – and we don’t know what to do about it. During the Cold War, we blamed communism for that amorality. Now we cannot blame communism any longer.