Story highlights Russian PM calls NATO's policy toward Russia 'unfriendly and opaque'

Critics in the West have opposed Russia on Ukraine, questioned its motives in Syrian intervention

(CNN) Bringing back the language of the 1950s and '60s, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev says the strained relationship between his country and the West could be described as "a new Cold War."

Speaking Saturday at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Medvedev said he sometimes found himself wondering whether this was 2016 or 1962.

"NATO's policy with regard to Russia has remained unfriendly and opaque. One could go as far as to say that we have slid back to a new Cold War," Medvedev said. "Almost on an everyday basis we are called one of the most terrible threats either to NATO as a whole or to Europe, or to the United States."

Tensions between the West and Russia have increased in recent years, in large part -- at least in the view of the West -- due to Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and its support for separatists elsewhere in eastern Ukraine.

More recently, some in the West have questioned whether Russia's intervention in Syria is helpful. Russia says it is attacking terrorists. But some observers contend that Moscow is intent primarily on propping of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is hanging onto power despite a five-year civil war.

Read More