Is Russia friend or foe? The answer is that nobody quite knows and a great many people feel tugged in two directions.
On the one hand here is a gigantic nation covering one-eighth of the world's inhabited land area, bursting with talent, a historical ally of the West against Europe's worst tyrants (e.g. Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler) and against fascism. This is the Russia of boundless resilience, of deep culture, of Tolstoy and Pushkin and Lermontov and Solzhenitsyn, a place for which many in Britain and elsewhere reserve a degree of fondness and admiration, and a vast and resource-rich part of the global community whose cooperation is essential in stabilizing the world around us.
On the other hand we have the prickly Russia, petulantly trying to be a great power without behaving like one, the Russia of widespread criminality and corruption, of persistent hackers, of everything somehow masked ("maskarova"), ambiguous and half true, of hybrid warfare, facing Janus-like into both Europe and Asia yet somehow being a comfortable neighbor of neither.