Vladimir Putin is a man of many talents, from skiing and judo to judging the considerable appetite of ordinary Russians for preserving their national identity. He is also good at smiling wryly for the cameras while fuming inside at the wider world’s perceived condescensions.

He will be fuming today. Five long years after President Bush looked into his eyes at their first meeting and claimed to have seen his soul, Mr Putin has been very publicly accused of international blackmail and of trampling on individual rights by Mr Bush’s deputy, Dick Cheney.

The venue was not Washington, but Vilnius, where the disintegration of the Soviet empire began in earnest 15 years ago. And the list of US concerns about the Kremlin includes not only its creeping authoritarianism and brazen use of energy as an instrument of foreign policy, but also its pointedly obstructive stances on Iran’s nuclear programme and UN reform. Much has changed in Russo-American relations since 1991, but the net shift in terms of epochal labels has been from Cold War to chilly peace.

Some will accuse Mr Cheney of jeopardising Washington’s own interests as the US seeks alternatives to Middle Eastern energy, notably in Russia. Others will see in his stark language a failure to grasp the nuances of Russia’s tortuous relationship with both its neighbours and its past. Both groups will underestimate both the Vice-President and the seriousness of the trends he has denounced. In the absence of robust European criticism of the Kremlin, largely because of Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, it is better that someone in the West challenge Mr Putin’s relentless accretion of power than no one at all. It is better for the US to do this openly and bluntly than, for example, by assisting Moscow-based pressure groups, only for them to become unwitting fodder for Russian nationalist conspiracy theorists. And it is better to challenge Mr Putin now than when it is too late.

There is no question that Mr Putin initially brought Russians and their neighbours the stability desperately needed after the near-anarchy of the later years of Boris Yeltsin. But neither is there any doubt that Mr Putin’s suppression of political opposition and critical media have gone much farther than the reimposition of order required. His is now effectively a one-party state, shorn of Soviet ideology but not of the systemic corruption that helped to destroy Sovietism. On the contrary, Russia continues to languish near the bottom of every transparency table, and the forthcoming London flotation of Rosneft, its state-controlled oil giant, has left international investors more wary than excited.

Those investors may be more interested in Mr Cheney’s next stop — Kazakhstan. He hopes to cement long-term energy deals there to secure oil and gas supplies from Central Asia and the Caucasus without depending on a truculent Russia. The US and the European Union can still stop that truculence blurring into paranoia, but only with straight talk. Mr Cheney’s example is worth following.