In the eyes of the tabloid press and old Cold Warriors, Putin, who became president in 2000 and was returned to that position in March for another term after serving as prime minister for four years, has turned Russia back into Reagan’s Evil Empire. He has prosecuted a belligerent foreign policy, even invading neighbouring Georgia. He has been tainted with gruesome assassinations, poisonings, and jail sentences for journalists and opposition leaders. We in the West are now egging on protesters in Moscow who are calling for a re-run of the parliamentary elections in December. There are comparisons to the Arab Spring.

The title of Angus Roxburgh’s book The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia, along with a cover photograph of the diminutive Putin taking off dark sunglasses with the Kremlin reflected in the lenses, gives the impression that this is a book that will play on all the Cold War themes. But Roxburgh has produced a more subtle book. He underlines that much of what makes Putin objectionable to the West is simply that he has opposed the Western agenda. In some cases, according to Roxburgh, Putin was right.

He points out for instance that Putin was quite within his rights to oppose the neo-conservative dream of an anti-missile Star Wars system based in Eastern Europe, which was targeted at Russia and which would have undermined existing anti-missile treaties. Roxburgh says that Putin used excessive force during his war against Georgia in 2008, but that he didn’t start the war. It was the Georgians, under the leadership of Mikheil Saakashvili, who were badly counselled by the Americans.

Internally, Roxburgh points out that Putin made some fairly sensible free-market economic reforms in the early 2000s and that Russians, generally, have enjoyed a better standard of living under Putin. While dissidents have been persecuted inside Russia and the media and politics have been muted, the intimidation is far short of the systematic repression under the communists. Roxburgh should know: as a veteran BBC journalist, he spent time in the Soviet Union.

I knew Roxburgh somewhat as a reporter when I worked in Moscow in the 1990s. He is deeply steeped in the Russian language and culture. I recall that he saw Russia’s support for Serbia during the Balkan Wars not as an anti-Western plot, but as a sign of Russia’s strange spiritual bond with the Serb people, for whom eight million Russians died in World War I.

Roxburgh is right to express the real dilemma about what Putin represents. It is true that he was a KGB operative, but it is also true that he quit the spy business fairly early in the perestroika era and took a job with the reformers. That is why he was given his job by President Boris Yeltsin.

Roxburgh deserves praise for his even-handedness in this portrayal. He presents unsqueamishly all the bad things about Putin, too. There is a blow-by-blow account of Putin’s attempt to intervene in the Ukrainian Orange Revolution in 2004–05, which included the macabre poisoning of the pro-Western presidential candidate, Viktor Yushchenko; and appropriate space is devoted to what is likely Putin’s greatest crime, his cynical and brutal war against Chechnya.

In a way, I wish Roxburgh had been less even-handed and more willing to pass judgement. He is scrupulous in not drawing conclusions. Indeed, in his conclusion he specifically says that we as outsiders should not draw any conclusions. This detachment is all very well for a BBC correspondent, and shows due respect for the difficult choices that Russia had to make after the collapse of its empire and its political system. At some stage, Russia needed to create a functioning, strong government, the drift under Yeltsin in the 1990s having been dangerous. But I suspect that, for Roxburgh, part of the problem in arguing for one side or the other is that he is himself personally conflicted.

Roxburgh makes no secret of the fact that he worked from 2006 to 2009 as a public relations consultant for the Russian government. He took a full-time contract with a Brussels-based PR team called G Plus and the US firm Ketchum to advise the Kremlin on its image in the West. He was there spinning Western journalists on Russian policy through such low points as the Ukrainian elections and the Russian invasion of Georgia.

It is an intriguing career choice. Roxburgh’s only explanation in the book is that he had spent the previous eight years in Brussels, presumably covering the European Union bureaucracy, which is perhaps enough to drive any red-blooded journalist to distraction. I wish he had explained his moral qualms in taking the job. He must have had some.

Roxburgh covers the issue in part. On one hand, he boasts that his job gave him the view of an insider as close as anyone to the Kremlin. On the other, he expresses frustration that the Kremlin did not heed his advice about the wisdom of being more open in dealing with the Western press and of realising that repression at home would undermine Putin’s credibility abroad. Nonetheless, Roxburgh’s past as spin doctor for a dictator still compromises his role as narrator, in some cases badly.

For instance, he discusses the poisoning of the eccentric dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London, in 2006. When it emerged that Litvinenko had been killed by radioactiove poison poured into his tea, apparently by a former Russian KGB agent, it became a huge story. This was clearly a crucial brief for Roxburgh in his role as a spin doctor. Yet we are given only the thinnest insight into how he handled it. Roxburgh, clearly concerned that Putin might be behind the crime, asked his boss, chief Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, about it. Peskov said that Putin was aghast that the West believed he might be personally involved.

I would be very surprised if Putin had bothered to order the elimination of this minor irritant, but what was shocking about the incident was that the man British police suspected, Andrei Lugovoi, was welcomed back to Russia and won a Duma seat with the governing party. This shows that Putin is quite happy for the KGB, at its lower levels, to run private hit men outside the rule of law. How could Roxburgh keep working for him in these circumstances? I am sure that he had some moral calculus which allowed him to keep spinning for the Kremlin – the money probably helped – but he misses an opportunity in this book to explain what he was thinking. It is not just about him. This is the calculation of millions of Russians who are also deciding how far they should take their opposition to the Putin régime.

Despite this missed opportunity, the book still works as a thorough treatment of the political, and especially the diplomatic, background to the Putin era. No doubt some of the limitations of the book reflect its origins as a television series called Putin, Russia and the West, which aired on the BBC in January 2012. Roxburgh is torn between a personal and thematic book, perhaps like David Remnick’s masterful Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1994), and a narrative of record pegged to the new material from the one hundred-odd interviews that apparently make up the bulk of the television series. I wish there had been more personal reporting. It probably doesn’t help that for the first six years of the Putin era he wasn’t actually in Russia, and for the next three he was working for the Kremlin.