Joe Biden’s tough-sounding talk during his campaign and his rhetoric and actions in the first three months of his administration didn’t give any indication that he was eager to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ukraine’s fate is also important to the United States, because the Biden administration’s Russia policy will be an early indicator of whether the administration can manage simultaneous challenges from Beijing and Moscow.

While the world waits for a Fourth Wave of Democracy, it is witnessing a diametrically different phenomenon: a surge of new authoritarianism.

Today, the two predominant political and social models—authoritarianism and liberal democracy—are experiencing simultaneous crises.

While the United States has made mistakes, the current state of Russian-American relations stems mostly from the Kremlin’s creation of imitation democracy and its attempts to exploit the West and anti-Americanism for political survival.

If implemented properly, the Magnitsky Act could mean the restoration of a normative dimension to Western policy on Russia.

Until recently, German-Russian relations were viewed as a model bilateral relationship. However, public opinion in Germany has grown increasingly critical of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and the German leadership can’t ignore this.

Through the recent parliamentary elections and pending peaceful transfer of power, Georgia has made several important strides toward establishing democracy and rule of law.

The Kremlin assesses the U.S. presidential candidates by one criterion: which will help it pursue its own domestic agenda. Moscow could be happy with both a second Obama term and a first Romney one.

Ukraine is the most important test of the Kremlin’s neo-imperialistic longings and also a test of the West’s interest in expanding its normative principles eastward—however, Ukraine itself should demonstrate a desire for deeper integration based on a democratic path.