Hi guys, my name is Aditya, I work for BrowserStack as infrastructure lead and I also contribute to Fedora project as well as other open source utilities around. So today I am going to talk about running containers. How many of you actually know about Docker, right? So you guys know that, you know, running Docker is cool, right? Okay, so now we are going to see certain things about running this cool stuff. We are going to check out what the problem is when we talk about running cool stuff. By project atomic and its associates will help us and if possible I will try to give up a short demo, right? Okay, so the problem is that now that we have figured out one tool to rule everything, we need a stable environment to run that one tool, right? We need to support automation because let's face it, containers are good but like any of the software containers can go wrong, they can crash, they cannot boot as per your requirement. A lot of bad things can happen in that area. And now that you are managing containers, you are managing the applications inside it, the idea of the entire exercise should be that, okay, you need to focus on containers not on the host because containers are the thing, you know, cool stuff. Okay, so this is project atomic. So Chetan Bhagat very rightly said this about project atomic.  Okay, so J.R. Tolkin said this about the one ring. Okay, so this is one project which this is kind of an umbrella project which Redat and some of its associates like, you know, Fedora project in CentOS are trying to build up. What essentially we are doing is we are trying to bring together a lot of projects who are present in the container ecosystem to, you know, build better tools so that, you know, we can reduce our pain of managing containers. So the first component which I'm going to introduce you to is the atomic host itself. Now atomic host is a very minimal operating system. It's based out of the RPMs which are coming from Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS or Fedora Linux. So basically you get the same Red Hat in CentOS and Fedora quality which you are already familiar with. It has robust atomic upgrades and system D and rollback processes. Now with atomic upgrades, you guys have heard of atomicity in the nature of databases, right? The transactions are atomic. How many of you have heard of this term that transactions are atomic in nature? Quite a few of you. Yeah, so I'll take up on that. Just know that right now we are working towards a very robust atomic upgrade systems. We are using system D which is to provide a lot of, you know, initial booting up and managing of the system. And right now the atomic is in good enough state that it can be deployed easily on cloud-based environment like EC2 or OpenStack. It can be virtualized with any of the hypervisors like QEMU and you can install it on bare metal as well. It includes RPMOS tree. How many of you have heard of RPMOS tree? Okay, okay. I'm sure you guys are working with GNOME. Okay, right. So what RPMOS tree does is it gives you a bootable, immutable version file system trees. So you guys have worked the git a lot. You know that all the files are versioned, right? So we take it and we add the concept of booting of that entire file system. So now your file system becomes versioned. You make a change to file system, you can revert it. Imagine that you can revert an entire operating system and you have some idea of what atomic is able to do. It's composed from standard app in that something which you've already covered. Atomic upgrades in rollback means that, see, managing something which is data center, which is in data center and production ready. You don't want anything to fail in between, right? You don't want your updates to stop in between. You don't want to, you know, any partial updates, packages going bad. Project atomic gives you a transaction-based upgrade.  Similar to what you get in database transaction systems, right? So when you swipe a card, the amount is deducted, either the full or nothing at all. There's no partial thing there. So that's what is happening with operating system. To achieve this, we have done a lot of immutation here. So by immutable, I mean to say that most of the file system is not writable. If you try to build a binary and insert a user bin or something like that, you won't be able to do that. It's all immutable except for war and ETC. Everything is immutable. ETC because, of course, you need to configure stuff. And war because you need to store something like your Docker images or your home files somewhere. So these two are the only directories that are writable. SystemD. SystemD, I'm sure a lot of you have heard a lot about it. Just a brief introduction. It's a system and services manager for Linux. It has already replaced the traditional Linux system in CentOS 7 and Rails 7. Fedora is shipping it with SystemD since quite a few releases now. It's highly modular. You can write modules for it for almost everything that an OS does and plug it in. It's good to go. SystemD can, you know, talking about SystemD can take like good R. So I suggest you guys go to 0.8.d. That's Lenard Portraying's website. He has extensive documentation on why to do this and what not. Okay. There's nothing about not. Why to do this? And it also includes Cockpit. So if you guys have ever worked with Webmin, something like that. Webmin from like a few years ago. Right? A few of you. So Cockpit project was developed independent. I mean, it was independent of entire Docker ecosystem. But it somehow ended up being shipping with Project Atomic. What it does is that you can attach a lot of host to it and you can manage them. For example, it will give you pretty graphs about how much CPU you are actually using, how much RAM you are actually using. You can manage it in the sense that you can turn on and off the services. You can check out things like what all containers are running on your Project Atomic host. You can check out what all images you have available. You can download and run even more images. You can check out how much resources your containers are using all from a pretty GUI perspective. So that helps a lot in visualizing how much efficient your system is actually going to be. This is like just one of the graphs. You can see the combined CPU usage of one of the systems. Memory usage. A few containers that I have here. I can actually drill down even more. I can click on the containers. It will go there. It will show me the utilization of container resources as well. All those things can be managed. And lastly, I would like to introduce Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a project by Google. This is to manage the containers running. So it helps in providing a very fault tolerant environment. So for example, let's say that your container can handle X amount of traffic and usually you serve 10 X of that. So ideally you would want at least 10 of those containers running in your infrastructure. But sometimes for unforeseeable reasons, the containers can go bad. They can crash or probably you can get massive spike or something like that. So in those cases, Kubernetes can help you very easily by scaling it up and making it fault tolerant. So in case one of them crashes, Kubernetes will observe your environment. It will detect that one of them has crashed and it will start booting it up. And within no time you will have your container back serving the traffic. So that helps the scalability cause a lot. You can create clusters of applications using Kubernetes. And eventually you can scale out an entire application cluster including databases, including your web servers and everything using Kubernetes. There are a lot of examples with Google Cloud Platform Repose. We can check out some very common examples about Nginx, WordPress and all those things. So these are some of the main components. There are more. Project Atomic is a very young project at the moment. And every week or every month we get more and more tools added. Latest would be NewlyQl. NewlyQl is a standard to make up these clusters. But let me not talk about it at the moment because just too hazy for now. But yeah, I think going forward we'll have more of that. Starting Atomic host you will need a cloud init server. Cloud init server, I mean, you guys must have been working with something of AWS sort. So have you guys ever thought that when you supply your key, your instance already has that? So that entire process is taken care by something called as cloud init, similar to cloud init. What cloud init does is that you feed it initial data and it will take all that data and supply it to the host. So for example, certain things like instance ID, IP addresses, public IP addresses, your keys, your users, they're all supplied to the instance by the cloud init data. So Atomic host also needs that. You can either run a cloud init server or if you are not in a state to run a cloud init server, you can fake it. So for smaller instances, for smaller deploys, this is what I do. I basically shove metadata in a text file and then create an ISO and make the virtualization tool behave as if that there is a cloud init server running. This is an entire process. I'm not going to demo this for now because this takes time.  And then you are generating an ISO image out of it. This ISO image will be mounted as a disk on your instance and the instance will read from there thinking that it's actually reading from a cloud init server. So this is a demo which I would want to do. Let's see. In the meantime, do you guys have any questions, anything? Yep, please. So in the same space right now you have two other interesting projects. Canonical Zubuntu snappy core and the most popular one in the space currently is CoreOS. Right. Especially with Fleet, HCD and Veeve. So what are the equivalents for Atomic to run something like Fleet which is super because of the distributed system D thing? Right. At the moment, I don't think there has been any work done in that direction to bring Fleet in Project Atomic. However, Project Atomic is working with a lot of the people which you mentioned. I think in near future you can expect Rocket to come to be in a state to run with Project Atomic. Isn't the basis of Rocket to get rid of PID-1 having system D to spawn the Docker process where they take the approach that Docker would be in a process? Right. So that's why I said in some time. We are trying to sort those issues out. Another thing which will come, so Docker is one of the things that Project Atomic does. Rocket is definitely the next thing which we are looking forward to do. There will be system D and spawn as well which will also help in containers. Now system D and spawn and Rocket, I mean, I know there is a direct conflict and collision, but... Given that it's driven by Red Hat and Lynard Putaring, so... Yes, yes it is. So as I said, it's like an umbrella project to bring a lot of stray projects together. Well, stray might not be the right word, but a lot of different projects who are working in same space together. So that's what we are trying to do. So yeah, Rocket, yes. XED is something which we already are using with Kubernetes. So XED is already there. I think Fleet I'm not really sure about. Right, so Kubernetes is what I'm... I'll try to demo right now. Kubernetes... So what happens is that you can run your Kubernetes API server on an atomic host or somewhere. Basically, your kubectl. A kubectl will run on the atomic host and kubectl is what is the tool which is going to run these Docker containers for you. So that's what the idea is. So in CoroS, you have a toolbox where you can mount a particular binary compiler like Python or PIP or any of the tools which automatically gets up one particular container in Ubuntu or Fedora. So this will eventually give us a command line communication on the CoroS mission. So is that Project Atomic have anything like that? Because I don't see any package manager in Project Atomic where you can install a particular thing and then just use it for some sort of an automation where you mount it through... Let's say Ansible have the same problem where CoroS, you need to do it with toolbox and then install the Docker-based plugin for that and then do an Ansible automation. But in Project Atomic, I don't see anything like that. I'm sorry, I didn't get it. Can you repeat that? Kubernetes relies on the ambassador pattern for HA and for distributed loads where you have something like v running in CoroS. So you have an L2 plane or an L3 plane on your entire fleet. Right. Okay, let me answer him first. So his question was around... Toolbox and CoroS and this. So the philosophy of Project Atomic is a bit different. The philosophy of Project Atomic is that technically you should never ever actually log in into the Atomic host. So modification of Atomic host, be it via package manager or be it via any other means is out of question. I mean, this is something which we don't want people to do. We don't want people to get into the host ever, ever. I agree. It's a lightweight OS. That's the reason you go for this kind of OS to implement on top of Docker to make it much more lighter. But when it comes to debugging these things, we need some sort of a tools where it at least give us a chance to debug and get the information back on the host. So in those scenarios, I would refer you to super privileged containers, SPC. What SPC does is that, for example, if you have a bunch of containers who are not behaving very nicely, using SPC, you can collect their logs, collect certain data like SAR data or logging data. And using SPC, you can have all that information ready for you to debug. So with your answer, it means to say that we can do some sort of things. But what if I want to do a configuration management through Ansible and I want to do nothing? The philosophy is that I don't want you to do that. If you want to use Ansible, you want to modify the host, then clearly you're looking at the wrong product. Then probably you should maybe go towards CentOS core or CentOS cloud offering or something like that. No, again, this project atomic is coming from the base of CentOS or Fedora, right? So if I can, when I do an update, if I install this particular tools, when I'm doing an upgrade, RSP, I mean RPM OS tree upgrade. So then I can install these tools and get the Ansible running, no? You cannot install, there is no concept of installing. The concept is that you can do atomic upgrade of already existing RPMs. What we do, what we can alternatively offer you is either a way to compose your own distribution, which is not very difficult. You can pick up CentOS as RPM, you can pick up Fedora as RPM. You can compose your own read-only file system. The whole philosophy of making it read-only is that you should not be able to install arbitrary tools. If you want to install tools, if you are not very comfortable with this concept and you want tools like probably things that has to be modified and worked upon, then I think you're looking at the wrong product altogether. You should explore more into CentOS core in that case, CentOS main operating system. If you want a non-immutable and if you want to install packages of your choice, then I think atomic is not going to do that for you. You have five more minutes. Do you want to take up more questions or do the demo? What do you want guys? Questions or demo? Demo. We'll take demo and then questions may be outside. Demo, I'll make it very short. Right. Do you see the font thing here? Last one. This is difficult. Is there a command line to do that? Okay. Right. So Kubernetes work in a very classic master-slave architecture. There is a Kubernetes API server. You can think of it as master. And then there are kubelets. So kubelets are the ones which actually execute. They communicate to API server, get the data, what kind of containers they want, and then they boot it accordingly. So right now, I have only one node with me. It's a virtual machine running on my system. What I want to do is I want to create a simple container which will just serve one image. So let me quickly do it. I have it ready. It just serves one image over HTTP. This is the standard definition. I mean, you can look it up on the Kubernetes repo. There are a lot of such examples out there. So this is the pod which is already running. I have already started it. And it is going to serve a static image. So this is the image which is being served.  As soon as I kill that container, this image would vanish. So I have this stopped. It will take a few seconds to stop. The image, once it stopped, the image should vanish from here. So the container is stopped. Image is no longer there. This is a very generic scenario. This is a very true production-like scenario where your container can crash.  So I stopped the container. I'll show you again what happened. If you see, my container is back here. Right? So this is our Qubectl work. Very short demo. If you want detailed code or something, catch me outside or tomorrow at Cloud BUF. I can explain it in more details. Now, do you have any questions now I can take up? I think I have a couple of minutes more. No? Time's up. Okay, we are done. Thank you, Aditya. Thank you.


All praise and thanks to the people I love and channel without them, and to the assistance and guidance and forgiveness. And I take reckoning with them from the people of the household that I'm the kind of prince by the steest. Whoever I love gets guidance too, and I can receive them, whether you receive them or can guide them. I've testified in the company of no one but the great, who besides their law alone, their partners. And I've testified to the people I love and some of them I've involved. In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. We'll ask Allah to grant him peace, and we'll send him the recitation and recitation, and this as we ask him to grant peace in the community, in the companions and everyone, all the businesses that he'll be building, the meeting, and the reckoning of Allah, to grant him a da'ab. In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, the Most Merciful. We report to the Sahbih, the Hadith from the Baah Muhammad, as Muhammad, and the Salam Alayhi Salaam. La ilayla l-Qadir al-Midi, Sha'a, bantif al-Din. The heart of the old old person remains young with respect to two things, the love of the dunya and the prolongation of hope. So the heart of the old person or the older person remains young with respect to two things, the love of this world, of this realm and the prolongation of hope. Now with respect to the second, I'll speak a little bit about this later, but the prolongation of hope is fundamentally the delusion that we have about living a long life. We don't know if we'll have the next moment, we don't know if we'll live on for the next day, the next year, etc. etc. We constantly delay things, we procrastinate, we'll become pious in the future. But with respect to the dunya there's a lot I want to focus on today with respect to the dunya. First and foremost, the word dunya sometimes is a reference to the life that we're living right now, al-hayat al-dunya, this lower life that Allah refers to as in the Qur'an over and over. That is to say it is just the fold where it is placed in terms of distinction to al-hayat al-taqira, the afterlife or the final life. And the afterlife it is better and more lasting. So sometimes it is a reference to the life that we live, we breathe air through our lungs etc. etc. Sometimes the dunya, the reference to this world upon which we live and then other times to the reference to the things and the attractions that exist in this world, the goods that we seek to consume to acquire in this world. And so the Prophet ﷺ says that the old person or the elderly person is to remain young with respect to the laws of the dunya, that we constantly hope to live longer, to have health for longer. We hope to find the content of youth one day. And so we delay and delay things, especially when we're young. But when we get older even though we may give up or lose attraction to or the desire for certain types of delights, that with respect to the love of this world, the attachment to this world, we don't lose it that easily, we don't lose it. We're risking it because we've a man so much. We have family, we don't want to let go of it. We have wealth that we hope to take with us when we die, of course we can't etc. etc. But the Prophet ﷺ said about the dunya, that the dunya is cursed and everything in it is cursed except for the remembrance of Allah, a learned person and one who's learned. And when Allah ﷺ said that something is cursed, what he means from the literally is that it is something that places this as we can do in your creator. This is youth from Allah's mercy. Everything in this world, it takes you away from Allah's mercy. It takes you away from the focus of that which is most important, which is the connection with your creator. Because all of us are going to return to our creator and the proof that we never meant to be in this world forever is the very fact that we die. That is the proof that Allah did not create you for the dunya. He created you for the Akhirah. That is what he created you for. Not for the dunya.  But he goes on and says, the Prophet ﷺ says, if this world of the dunya had a way and that swing in the sight of God, that he would not give an unbeliever one drink of water, if it meant anything to Allah, if they say, this means nothing to him. The value of this world, you place value on things that Allah has placed no value on. That it meant anything to God. He would not give a cup of one drink of water. But he doesn't have it because he doesn't mean anything to Allah. If you make something as small as that. But also he reminds this hadith how much iman means to Allah because he says he would not get a cup of one drink of water, which means that Allah has placed your iman on faith in him. Faith in his message. The Prophet ﷺ also told us, We hope that the knowledge of Allah has been surrounded by undesirable things, unattractive things. And the hellfire has been surrounded with attractive things. Perfect in knowledge of Allah. In other words, the things that people enjoy the most in this world seem to mean a lot of them, it's not most of them just ha. As a believer, you can't end all. You're not allowed to end all. People get drunk. People get high.  A lot of those things have been attractive to the average person because we have these appetites of the believers, Allah has created the believers. But the believer who is seeking Jannah, that we bear patiently. We restrain ourselves. We resist our irritants. In Mammut Shafari, he said about the dunya, We have tasted the dunya and the sweet and the bitter have been conveyed to us. We have tasted the sweet and the bitter have been conveyed to us. And when I reflected upon the dunya, I thought there's nothing more than delusion and falsehood in the same way that have arrived with tears in the midst of the desert. It is nothing more than a riding course that dogs, they are competing with one another to consume. So if you avoid it, then you are a source of peace for the inhabitants of this world. But if you acquire it, then the dogs, they will compete and buy with you for it. So one should evolve all of the unwanted and additional things from this world because it is around upon the heart of the highest to consume and acquire it. The dunya itself, the nature of the dunya is that as connected with the human being as the different appetites and urges that Allah has given us is that it creates within the human being jealousy and a hasat that the human being is inclined towards marginalities, being inclined towards self-love, anger, so many different things, but inclined towards it. And we have to be very careful especially about a hasat about jealousy regarding the dunya because fundamentally it is a way of challenging the wisdom of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. In other words, we find some other way to make you more handsome for you, or more beautiful, has more wealth than you have, has more knowledge, has more popularity. That we want those things innately because that's a long way along for us. But we have been put here to put down our urges, right? And when we see these other people who have what we don't have, or have more than what we have, and we wanted to be removed from them, then it's fundamentally us saying, oh Allah, why did you create such a person? Allah, why did you make such a person so beautiful? Why did you get such a person so much wealth? Why did you get such a person so much knowledge? Why did you give them so much popularity? I deserve that. Or even if you don't want it to be yourself, I don't believe that they deserve it. So I was meant to say that you are more wise than Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, you are wiser than your creator. And this is a fundamental flaw of its needs. And this is what I conclude. Al-Hassan Al-Basri, he said that man kanan za luhuhu pi shahratin fahratin luhuhuhu et alba, that any persons, whether that were to send, relate to a passion, then we should put hope in their repentance.  Well man kanan za luhuhu pi shahratin fahratin luhuhu et alba, but whoever's sins are connected with pride, they don't put any hope in their repentance. He said with the legal adab, adab it leads. And the evidence of that is adab and it leads. In other words, it leads adab and both they disobey Allah s.w.t. But adab's sin was for respect to his passions, that he ate from the tree. He had an appetite to eat from the tree. He wanted to know, he was curious to know what would happen. It leads, told him something, he was here to confirm that he was telling the truth. But it leads his sin related to pride. Allah said, bow down, prostrate to adab. I'm not going to prostrate to something he created from mud. No. I'm better than him. And so for this reason, it leads, we don't expect anything total from it leads. And Allah tells us that he won't, he won't do it. He'll return to Allah s.w.t. Then we write, this Hadith of the Prophet by some other conclusion is a reminder of us and of our Satan, the, the, the reasons why I read this world and also the potential, potential flaws that may develop within us. He says, that the heart of the older person remains young with respect to two things, hope with dunya or to the love of this dunya and the congregation of hope. He asked Allah s.w.t. that he reduced in a loop from us to love and this dunya as he prepared to return to him, may cause all of us to return to him, insha'Allah. Allah s.w.t. Allah s.w.t.


Thank you very much. Earlier this morning, you get – both you get, and Jean spoke about the need for good governance in attacking this problem, and nowhere is that more a factor than in Russia, which is the focus of our next panel. Other than China, Russia has the largest outflows of illicit money in our annual survey, $2 trillion since 1994. Many of our other country-specific studies go back much further. I think India was 1948. Data from Russia is only since 94, and it's $2 trillion. So quite significant. People are very aware of the problems there, oligarchies and so on and so forth. So I think we're going to get some very specific information from our next panel, Dr. Anders Ashland, Peter Harrell, and our moderator, Clark Gascoigne. Thanks. Thank you, Tom. I also just wanted to quickly note that we have a new edition. There was a new program printed today. Evgeny Shumilov is going to be joining us from the Russian embassy. So as Tom mentioned, my name's Clark Gascoigne. I am the Deputy Director of the FACT Coalition that stands for Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency. FACT is a coalition uniting roughly 100 plus small business, labor, faith-based, human rights, anti-corruption, public interest, international development organizations, you name it. Mostly here in the US focused on curtailing the abuses of offshore tax havens and the revenue drain associated with that on the US government. Also curtailing the illicit flow of money through the US financial system and a big component of that. And where we put a lot of our effort in the coalition is on the abuse of anonymous companies and ensuring that beneficial ownership transparency when you incorporate a business here in the United States that you're declaring who the true human person is that owns that company as that gets to the heart of one of the biggest tools for laundering money around the world. As we've heard a lot so far about the pernicious global effect of illicit financial flows, the effect that this has on developing countries, the least developed countries, on countries like India, but this is really truly a global phenomenon. It has a huge impact on the United States, which is where our coalition comes in and we're trying to curtail those abuses at FACT, but also on countries like Russia, which is the subject of our current panel. Russia has had cumulative illicit outflows of 1.34 trillion dollars since it started reporting data to the IMF in 1994 and illicit inflows of 1.93 trillion dollars for cumulative illicit flows totaling 3.27 trillion. This is a startling amount of money to be flowing in and out of the country and amounts to an equivalent of roughly 20% of Russia's GDP. So with that, I'm going to get to introducing our panel and our first speaker in particular is going to be Anders Ostlund, who is a resident senior fellow in the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. He is a leading specialist on East European economies, especially Russia and Ukraine, and also teaches at Georgetown University. He has served as an economic advisor to several governments, notably to the Russian government from 1991 to 1994 and to the Ukrainian government from 1994 to 1997. Dr. Ostlund served as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Geneva, Poland, Moscow and Stockholm From 89 to 94, he was professor and founding director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economies at the Stockholm School of Economics. He has also been a scholar at the Kenan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and with the Brookings Institution. From 1994 to 2005, he worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a senior associate and director of the Russian and Eurasian program. In parallel, he was co-directing the program on post-Soviet economies at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He was a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. I think that about sums up every single think tank in Washington from 2006 to 2015. Dr. Ostlund received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1982. He has a BA from the University of Stockholm and an MSc in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics. Dr. Ostlund has authored 13 books and edited 16 books and has been published widely.  He is an economic officer at the Embassy of Russia, where he specializes in the U.S. economy and oil and gas issues. He has been with the embassy in the U.S. since 2012. He received his master's degree in economics at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations and a master's degree in business at the Gubkin Russian State Oil and Gas University. Our third panelist today is Peter Harrell. Peter Harrell is the founder and principal of Prospect Global Strategies LLC, a boutique consulting firm that advises U.S. and international companies on economic sanctions, political risk, and international policy matters. Prior to founding Prospect Global Strategies, Mr. Harrell served from 2012 to 2014 as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counter-Threat Finance and Sanctions in the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. In that role, Mr. Harrell was instrumental in developing U.S. sanctions, developing U.S. economic sanctions policy, including U.S. and international sanctions against Iran, Russia, and Syria, and in easing sanctions against Myanmar and Cuba. He played a leading role in the U.S. government's efforts to counter terrorist financing and served as co-chair of the U.S. government working group on combating the financing of the Islamic State. Mr. Harrell also had broad responsibility for fighting the global trade and conflict minerals, including implementation of the Dodd-Frank Conflict Minerals Provisions, the Kimberley Process Rough Diamond Certification Agreement, and global supply chain integrity. From 2009 to 2012, Mr. Harrell served on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning staff, where he co-led the development of Secretary Clinton's economic statecraft agenda, which brought a renewed focus to the role of international economics in American diplomacy. He also worked on a variety of other economic issues, including trade and investment policy and international legal issues. In addition to leading prospect global strategies, Mr. Harrell serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where he writes on the intersection of economics and national security. Harrell is a frequent public commentator and has been published or quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, MSNBC, and various media outlets. He's also a frequent speaker and panelist at industry conferences, including giving presentations at the British Bankers Association, and so forth. Mr. Harrell is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton and holds a JD from the Yale Law School. He's originally from Atlanta. So welcome to our panelists. We'll start off with Anders to get everyone started. Anders? Thank you very much for a long and kind presentation. I wanted to focus on a few major things about this report. First of all, I think that this is a good report. I should say what really comes out from the report, which is not stated, but you can see it from the statistics. It is that Russia is quite a wealthy country, but it does not have a rule of law. So therefore you would expect large outflows and large inflows, and that's exactly what you're seeing. The Russian Bank is located abroad because money is not safe in a Russian bank because the Russian state cannot guarantee the rule of law. That's the essence that I see coming out of this report. And if we look upon it here, I think the amounts make sense. They are very large, and that's the general impression. They are twice as large as from other BRICS economists, and part of it was Russia's much richer, and it has less rule of law than the others. And it's very good that both inflows and outflows are emphasized. And it also discusses that to begin with, the problem was macroeconomic instability, high inflation, and untrustworthy exchange rates, and then repeated bank collapses, which are not discussed. And today the problem is the rule of law, so that you keep free cash abroad. Something that is essential for this story is the rule of Cyprus, not only for Russia but for the rest of the former Soviet Union. Because at the end of the Soviet Union, a double taxation agreement was completed between the Soviet Union and Cyprus, and that remains in force. This double taxation agreement means that you don't pay tax on transactions when you go through Cyprus. So virtually all transactions for a long time went through Cyprus from Russia, the same for Ukraine. And if you look upon the big crash in Cyprus two years ago, the strange thing about Cyprus was that there was so much cash in the banks. And that comes from Russia and Ukraine. And you wonder why didn't people move the cash? Well, much of this cash was held by state officials who did not know how to move the cash because they were not sufficiently sophisticated. I heard that in Ukraine the group that were particularly hit were the poor state prosecutors who kept all the bribes that they had gathered in simple bank accounts in Cyprus because they did not know how to invest the money. The more serious money, of course, moves on. So we then come to the question who are these people who take out all this money? And I would suggest three categories, three very different categories to you. And one category is obvious. You mentioned already the oligarchs. You have or had $100 billionaires in Russia. And they have moved out the money to a considerable extent that also explains that when the oil price goes up, the capital outflows increase as the report points out simply because you have more free cash. So where do you keep it? You keep it in the bank and the bank is abroad. So this is quite un-dramatic and quite natural. The second group is the state officials and the cronies. This is the serious and interesting group. And these people are making lots of money being top state officials. A few years ago there was a joke in Russia. Advice to a young Russian woman. When you get married, it's better to marry a top state official than an oligarch because the money is the same and the tenure is so much safer for a state official. So this captures the situation in Russia today that the top state officials are making immense money and are widely considered to be billionaires while it's only sometimes reflected in the Forbes list. And this is, of course, money laundering when the money goes outside of Russia. And I think that this is something that in your context here should be considered quite seriously. That top state officials and cronies, many of these are now on the US sanction list but they could have been prosecuted for money laundering before. And when I ask people connected with the Department of Justice why they don't go after these people, they say, sorry, we don't have resources for this. These investigations are very costly and we have a very small budget for international investigations. It's really just by chance when we manage to go after somebody like Dmitry Firtas in Ukraine. And then we have a third group, smaller, medium-sized businessmen. The people who are not moving to London but are moving to the Baltic states because they don't have more money but they want to live safe and you don't live very safe as a former businessman in Russia. So they want to get out of the country and this gives us three very different groups. The first they manage on their own, we don't really care about them. The second are quite a serious issue, not least since many of them come from the security services. And the third is people who should be taken care of. So then finally, what does Putin's deoptorization mean? Well, one of my Russian friends said Putin's deoptorization means that Timchenko has moved back to Moscow, that is Putin's wealth is crony. He moved from Geneva, he's a Finnish citizen, and he has moved to Moscow now. So the kleptocrats haven't been nationalized, they have moved back. You can see that the top national security officials, they have by and large the children in top position in the state corporations. But at the same time, it's driving honest businessmen away from Russia. And this is of course a question, what should be done about Cyprus and the money flows. You don't really want to stop it, you want to clean up the dirty part of it and to hope for a role of law in Russia in the foreseeable future, seems rather utopian. Thank you. Alright, thanks Anders. We'll turn it over now to Jenny. Yep, you're welcome to speak from the theater up here. Well, thank you everyone for being here today. I'm really delighted to deliver remarks on the Russian perspective. I'm not that experienced as my colleagues here on the panel, but well, I try to be also precise to what is the topic of today, illicit financial flows. Well, we strongly believe that an effective fight against such criminal threats and challenges as terrorism financing, as drug trafficking and illegal weapons trafficking and money laundering cannot be limited solely to the military and law enforcement measures. It should be based on the multilateral cooperation under the aegis of the United Nations and the Security Council. And by the way, it was Russia's initiative to include such kind of a dangerous nexus in a paragraph of the Fundamental Council Terrorism Resolution adopted in 2001 by the Security Council 1373, I suppose, that calls on all countries to enhance their joint efforts and their cooperation in fighting such crimes and contribute to the global stability. That is the policy we pursue. And the core element of that is the Federal Service of Finance Monitoring. It's the Russian Financial Intelligence Unit that investigates on an annual basis well, thousands of such crimes as like money laundering, drug trafficking and so on. And given the global nature of such problems, we're really glad that we have over 80 bilateral agreements with various countries, including the United States. And despite the current political situations, such consultations, even in that sphere, are of particular importance for both countries and those consultations are still going on and that is a really positive and good signal. Just a couple of results regarding the 2014 efforts by our Financial Intelligence Unit. Russian authorities received in 2014 alone 11 million reports on suspicious activity. That is the main instrument of trying to end those criminal activities from financial institutions. And their volume is estimated to be at $2.6 trillion, so pretty insane, I would say. And that number also demonstrates the growth of more than 50% compared to 2013. Careful attention is also paid to international transboundary transactions since they're considered to be of somehow the riskiest. In this regard, I can say that the number of international reports on that suspicious activity grew 80% compared to 2013 and their volume to $200 billion. And despite the outstanding growth, the results, the number and volume of suspicious operations per se dropped 50% and to about $25 billion. These results were achieved, among others, thanks to joint efforts by Russian Financial Intelligence Units as well as their international colleagues in central banks through various measures like account freezing, operation suspension and many others. Then comes drug trafficking. Well, the least a drug trafficking accounts for like half of all criminal transboundary transactions and 20% of all transactions criminal overall. But only just 1% of proceeds coming from drug trade and production is confiscated. That means that almost all drug money in the course of time is becoming part of the legal financial system. And one of the biggest chunks of that world narcotic pie belongs to Afghanistan, which is certainly considered to be a great threat and poses severe challenges not only for Russia but various countries in Europe, Central Asia and beyond. 70 million people are estimated to abuse drugs originated from Afghanistan. Those proceeds and transactions annual basis are estimated at $70 billion. And in order to better understand the links between those money that could be used to fuel terrorism and extremism in various regions of the world, while Russia last year during its presidency at the Financial Election Task Force initiated a typological research inviting with the participation of experts from the United States, China, India, Pakistan, well, World Bank, IMF and the results of that research were very welcomed by the international community experts and besides by the Security Council. And if I may, just a couple of words on terrorist financing as well, since Russia is directly exposed like any other country to a terrorist threat and gives priority to establishment of a reliable system combating that. In order to implement Russia's obligations and to ensure that terrorists do not receive that financing as supposed to from illegal illicit activity. A list of the organizations and individuals which are known to be involved in terrorist and extremist activity is updated on a regular basis. It's like system is similar to the one that has the Treasury Department here with those blacklists and on the Russian blacklists there are 470 foreign nationals 4400 Russian residents which are forbidden to do any business with. Russia believes that today's focus should be paid to combating modern techniques of terrorist financing like crowdfunding, like modern methods of communication networks and material support. And besides, I just wanted to briefly reiterate that the principal position of our government that collecting efforts in fighting terrorism, drug trafficking should be free of double standards and politicization as it is really counterproductive in that sphere and well the safety of countries and population should be wobbled and I'll be happy to answer your questions and welcome your comments. Thank you. Thanks, Afghani. So we'll save questions and answers till the end but we'll continue on to Peter. So feel free. Thank you very much. I'd like to thank GFI and Raymond Baker and Channing May and the whole team for inviting me to participate here today and appreciate the chance to offer a couple of remarks. Let me begin by saying like Anders I thought this was a really interesting report well researched, timely, brought home the scale of the illicit financial flows with Russia and a nice follow-up to a really comprehensive report that many of you may have seen that GFI did, it's two years ago now, focused on Russia in 2013 and really leaves a lot of food for thought. I want to pick up on just a couple of things that struck me about the report building on a couple of points Anders made. And first is the role of Cyprus. This came through really in the report two years ago, comes through here which is a little bit shorter on Russia as well. I mean Cyprus has played this incredibly important role for Russian, both illicit and illicit financial flows for 15, 20 years now. And I think one of the things that will be interesting to see the data in this report is obviously now about 18 months out of date doesn't really reflect the European Union or American sanctions that have come into place over the last 18 months. And I think one of the interesting things to see going forward will be the extent to which flows that had been going through Cyprus migrate elsewhere, somewhere outside of the European Union. I work with the financial community on a variety of financial crime compliance issues as part of what I do. And I would say that we're seeing, I haven't seen public statistical evidence on this yet, but I would say that financial institutions are seeing more Russian money show up, particularly to some extent in Hong Kong and then in Singapore, also a little bit in the Middle East, which really shouldn't be a surprise, particularly because, as Anders mentioned, one of the principal sources of illicit financial outflows from Russia have been Russian state officials and regime-linked cronies such as Mr. Timchenko, where now many of them subject to sanctions by the United States and a couple of them subject to sanctions by the European Union. So it shouldn't really be a surprise that we're beginning to see anecdotally change in the pattern of flows, but it'll be interesting to see when we begin to see that statistically and also where else we will see those flows wash up. The other interesting thing about Cyprus is the way in which so much of the money goes back into Russia. I mean, one of the things that we, and this is highlighted in the report that we see with Russia more so than with some of the other countries studied is the round-tripping of money, where it's coming out and rather than being, well, although some of it is clearly parked outside of Russia, because I think people in Russia would like to keep their money outside of Russia, they're also using these non-Russian vehicles, Russians are taking money moving outside of Russia, then using non-Russian banks and corporate vehicles to reinvest some of the money in Russia, which I think, like Anders, I think reflects the generally poor confidence in Russian banks. You don't really want your money in the Russian banks and also in the rule of law. And it'll be interesting to see as the economic situation in Russia continues to deteriorate and as sanctions come into kind of continue to remain enforced, and I think most of us who look at that issue think the sanctions on Russia are going to remain into force for some time until there is an improvement on the situation in eastern Ukraine. It'll be interesting to see if the kind of reinvestment in Russia also dries up. I mean, we've seen this massive outflow on the licent side, on the legal side. We've seen this significant increase in outflows over the last 18 months as legitimate Russian actors and as international businesses in Russia take money out of Russia because of the deteriorating financial economic conditions in Russia. It'll be interesting to see how that's tracked on the illicit side and then also as the opportunities for business in Russia likely continue to constrict with a combination of sanctions and low oil prices, whether this kind of reinvestment of illicit funds in Russia also flows. I think we'll just be interesting to see, very interesting report and also be interesting to see what the next 18 months bring in terms of the shifting patterns of these financial flows both out of and into Russia. Thank you to all of our panelists so far. So I want to continue on what you were talking about with the oil prices in particular. The report found a link between higher oil prices and higher illicit outflows with the precipitous drop in oil prices. Is that going to have a significant impact on these illicit flows? So, you know, let me start by saying a little bit of what we have seen on the licent side. So last year on the illicit side, you know, according to Russian central bank statistics and sort of IMF World Bank statistics, we saw total capital outflows. Again, this is sort of illicit official statistics, not analysis for 2014, of $150 billion, $154 billion. And that was a significant increase over what I think had been sort of under 100, just about 100 the year before in 2013, again on the illicit side. You know, it looks like from the published estimates I've seen this year, 2015, we're probably looking at slightly below that. I mean, I saw a projection of maybe $130 billion in, again, sort of official statistic capital outflows for 2015. So that's actually a smaller delta than I would have predicted looking at kind of oil price declines. You'd think looking at the data in here that if we're just looking at sort of the oil price decline impact, you'd see a greater drop-off 2015 versus 2014. But I think the countervailing thing is just as the economic decline in Russia continues, we're going to see folks working to ship as much capital out of the country as they possibly can because they see fewer opportunities in Russia. So I think we're probably going to see both illicit and illicit kind of continued high outflows this year. At some point that money will kind of dry up because there's less money coming into the Russian system. So we're now talking about kind of sort of built-up capital in Russia, I think, coming out of Russia rather than kind of current inflows coming out of Russia. At some point the built-up capital dries up, Putin needs more of it to kind of bail out his cronies and sort of make domestic purposes. So I think we'll see high outflows this year but then barring some change in the situation probably a fairly strong drop-off, you know, next another year from now or so. Yeah, let me take it, follow up on that. Say that you have three big impacts now on the capital flows. The first is sanctions, which as Peter mentioned means the leveraging. Russian companies cannot get long-term financing now, so they have to pay off. And this is particularly true of the state companies that have been sanctioned. They account for 40% or so of the total indebtedness or perhaps half. And the second impact is the oil price in another way. And it is that it means falling exchange rate. The exchange rate has fallen by about half in dollar terms in a year and people expect that it will continue to fall. Expectations might be wrong but therefore many of the big Russian business have paid off their debts voluntarily if they have possibilities because they don't want to take the big currency risk that they are not being exposed to. So previously we have higher oil price meant that you got more cash and kept it abroad. Now lower oil price means that you have less cash in the future and therefore you want to minimize the risk so you can survive. So therefore the oil price actually has the opposite effect in this situation than previously. Yeah, I just made several points. First of all regarding the capital outflow from the country. Well, that's true according to official statistics. That was last year, it's about that, more than close to $150 billion. But still the central banking officials also underlined that on purpose that about 40% of those volumes were the conversion by the Russian population and Russian banks of rubble currency that was dropping due to oil prices into dollars but still keeping those in Russian banks. So on the paper that looks like outflow but conversion into dollar but pretty significant part of that money still remains in the country. And the second will answering your question regarding the oil price and the illicit financial flows. Well to me this is rather clear and the report also indicated that oil prices and Russian economy that's not a secret is heavily dependent on oil exports and gas exports. So with oil prices going up, the economy is booming and the number of oil transactions and their volume, legal, illegal is increasing. That I think is rather clear and that's vice versa. Oil prices drops, the GDP growth that we experience now is about like minus 3.4%. It also reflects that the number of those transactions that business activity is called and that means that the number of those transactions is also lower. Now is the lower oil prices which is creating a bit of a strain on the finances of the government is this with such huge outflows of money and even the illicit inflows which can be dodging customs duties, taxes, tariffs, things like that that help fund the government. Is there going to be a renewed emphasis within the Russian government to actually try to get on top of this problem do you think? Well I think well as we certainly follow on a regular daily basis what is going on in the Russian economy as well in the US economy is that the thesis that the Russian economy is collapsed or is deteriorating I think that somehow overstated a little bit since if you recall last year when sanctions, first sanctions were imposed, lots of officials and experts here kept saying that well Russian economy is going to collapse in a year or so but well nothing like that has happened. Russia has the minimum state debt, it has nothing to worry about. We have huge reserves and all prices going up, going down that is the regular, well that's regular natural thing. Then that large debts that Mr. Dr. Aslan mentioned that Russian companies had for sure but you know well as I was following the Russian media last week there was somehow the period of corporate debt repayment and all Russian companies did that well. We don't see any bankruptcies. Gazprom, Rosneft who have no access to long term financing here in the western market they saw somehow turning to Asian, well Singapore, Hong Kong that were mentioned as well. So in this regard and the oil price by the way we should always bear in mind that Russian budget isn't rubles, not in dollars so the devaluation of rubles coupled somehow it offsets the effect of lowering oil prices. So in this regard well the situation is not that severe. Okay Dr. Aslan I'm going to open up the question. Let me put another picture. When it comes to the public finances it's right because we've exchange rate falling like this. The budget is counted in rubles so the budget deficit will become something like three and a half, four percent of GDP rather than being close to balance. That's not a problem. The public debt is very small. It's about one tenth of GDP so that is not a problem. And if we look up on the current account Russia's exports so far this year has fallen by 30 percent but imports have fallen by 39 percent. These are dramatic numbers. And Russia's GDP in dollar terms according to the IMF this year because of a falling exchange rate will be down to 1.2 trillion dollars rather than 2.1 trillion dollars last year. So in dollar terms Russia is now one and a half percent of a global GDP rather than three percent of GDP as it was a year ago. So these are dramatic things. And you wonder what does it mean for the people. The real wages so far this year have fallen by about nine percent. So this is where we are seeing the big blow in the Russian economy. GDP not so much. The official forecast for this year from the Minister of Economy of Russia is 3.3 percent decline. The IMF has slightly more decline. I would expect something more. But I wouldn't say that people said that the Russian economy will collapse, decline, yes. And we are seeing a substantial decline, a decline of four percent or so. That is a big decline. All right. Great. Just briefly. Just briefly. Yeah, really briefly. That is certainly part of that is true. But if you start digging into that, take a international trade for instance. That's true Russian exports and the import dropped dramatically like 30 percent. But that is only on the value basis. As we all know that oil price, gold price, metals, commodity markets are in decline now. So the price for that commodities, these are considered to be maybe half 70 percent of Russian exports. The price for that volume is declined. But if you look at the volume thing, right, so the size of the exports in natural terms, take it for instance the Russian U.S. trade. Russian exports to the United States in volume terms increased for the first half of 2015, 8 percent. Despite drop of 30 percent in value. Great. So Channing and Lucy, you guys have, okay. I think Dev's got a question over here. And well, and then Raymond's got a question. So let's actually, let's take two of them right now. So we'll do Dev and then the fellow back here. Dev Kar, Chief Economist, GFI. Well, I have just two comments. One is that the current situation is kind of unique. I mean, when we're talking about the link between illicit flows and oil prices, we had sort of a relatively more stable economy with less crisis and less political crisis. Right now, this is a pretty unique situation with sanctions and the crisis in Ukraine. So that relationship between oil prices and illicit flows is not quite, we can't be extrapolated into the current situation. So that's one. So in other words, if you have this oil prices decline, that doesn't necessarily mean that illicit flows will decline because the other factors that drive illicit flows like macroeconomic crisis and uncertainty, risk and so on and so forth, also is on the ascendancy and so that will create a bigger driver for illicit flows. So I'm not sure how it's going to come out on the balance, but those are open questions. The other comment I would like to make is that I really wanted to study the role of Cyprus and other tax havens in the absorption of illicit flows from Russia. But unfortunately, the BIS, the Bank of International Settlements, would not simply give us data from the deposits coming out from a country to another country. In other words, there's no data that will let us map A to B kind of transactions. They will say that we can give you data from a group of countries, capital coming out from a group of countries, going into a group of countries. Well, that's no good to us. So, you know, there's always a data problem. And if I'm not able to back up the evidence with data, I usually don't talk about it. So then we'll take the one from the guy over here as well. It's our Stephen Dockery, the Wall Street Journal. My question is related to the data and compared to the 2013 report. It seems to be an order of magnitude larger in terms of the financial total inflows and outflows. I want to make sure I understand that totally. And why is that? Is there a different methodology or are the numbers different just in the last few years? Yeah, so I know GFI ended up updating its methodology between the 2013 report and the release of this one. And so I'll actually hand it back to Dev maybe quickly just to explain. Yes, Russia, the Russian central bank is one of the very few central banks in the world that publishes data on capital flight. And therefore I would like to be on record appreciating, you know, this fact that it is there for the whole world to see. And in fact, those numbers are even quoted by the IMF. So it's the IMF country reports. So it's very helpful to us. But so in order to be consistent with that methodology, which also includes licit outflows, we adopted a methodology that can be directly comparable to what the central bank is putting out. But our recent methodology in the last couple of years, we have been focusing solely on the illicit capital that is coming out. But that is, well, the illicit capital is still a huge portion, the majority of the portion of total capital flows out of Russia. But we just wanted to be a little bit consistent with what the central bank is putting forward. So is that different then? So I know between 2013 and the end of 2013, GFI updated to look at bilateral trade discrepancies as opposed to looking at discrepancies of, say, Russia with the world. They were looking at Russia with the U.S., Russia with the U.K., Russia with China, Russia with, et cetera. Well, yes. If you want to go to that level of detail, the thing is, yes. I mean, we also have revised the way we estimate trade misinvoicing. There was a comment that we did not correct for the antipod trade involving Hong Kong, for example, which might lead to some double counting. So once you take out the reexports from Hong Kong, the illicit flows went down a little bit. And this was a comment by Brookings, and we took that on board. But then I started thinking that if there is a methodology that for legitimate reasons lowers the illicit outflows, there is also legitimate reasons that we're not taking into account currently that will up the illicit flows. And that is basically when you consider the fact that traders don't trade with something called industrial countries. There's no such thing. It's a statistical construct. Advanced countries, industrial countries. Previously, we compared a developing countries trade with the group of industrial countries. But when traders actually misinvoice, they misinvoice with regard to specific countries, not a group, because that doesn't exist in his head. So when we did that country by country, the illicit flows came out much larger. So in that sense, also, there is a change. I think that was the biggest boost we saw in the Russian number. It came from that update in the methodology. Right, thank you. So I'm going to hand it over to Raymond. But first, I just wanted to build off of what you said about the BIS data. We had the data panel yesterday, and there was a few different wish lists of data. And it didn't come up at the time, the BIS data, how great it would be to have data on particular one country to another country, what economists, what people, researchers could do with that, and getting the BIS to publish that data. There's no reason that that should be confidential data. It would be key for research in this area. So hand it over to Raymond. Obviously, GFI studies flows, but I would like to ask a question about stocks of money abroad. Anders, you and I have talked and I forget whether you have addressed the question publicly or privately as to the amount of assets held outside of Russia by government officials. Do you have an estimate of that at the present time? Second question that I would like to ask is about gun for its structure. Was it affected at all by sanctions that were put in place against individuals? What's the nature of that now? All right, Anders. First, let me just concur with what Deb said here about the Central Bank of Russia. The Central Bank of Russia has an excellent website for statistics, publishes about one week afterwards, for each week, reserves there are, and it's available both in Russian and English, and it's very good to operate for all kinds of purposes. So this is the best Central Bank website I actually watch on, and it has not deteriorated in any way. One Raymond's question here about stocks, I don't know where it comes from. There is a number moving around $700 billion of total private Russian assets abroad, and I would guess that out of that, perhaps 100 to 200 are government officials, but that is only a guess. This is the dignities we are talking about, and it's quite well with the numbers that you have here. Of course, you get a certain interest rate or return on the money when you hold them. So Russian money held abroad is a very substantial amount, and if we take a biggest private Russian group, Alpha Group, has now set up letter one with an official capital of $27 billion that is based in London. And this is a perfectly legal company, so the money is big, but I don't have any assessment. Gunvar is very interesting. Immediately after Gennady Timchenko was sanctioned, was in March last year, he sold his share of, whatever it was, 33% of Gunvar to his partner, the Swedish citizen, Tobjan Tönkvist. So this is a deal between a Swedish and a Finnish citizen. And after that, now recently, the US government went after other assets of Timchenko's. So he is seriously being pursued by the US authorities, and personally had to move, as I mentioned, from Geneva, where a beautiful lakeside villa to Moscow, and where he lives on the Moscow Hill in an old political bureau villa just beside Moscow State University. And he can't use a mastercard, so you have to use the Chinese credit card, poor thing. Life is hard, but more importantly, both his and Arkady Rothenberg's fortunes, according to Forbes, in one year have fallen by 40%. Sorry, I shouldn't say the number, but it fell very substantially. So they are off for a hard time. And also, Timchenko and Rothenberg, the two main cronies of Putin, they were supposed to be general contractors of Silla, Siberia, the power of Siberia, the big pipeline from Yakutsia to China. And it turned out that they couldn't do it because the Chinese were not ready to give them bank credits, because they were afraid of the U.S. sanctions and did not want to be sanctioned. And Rothenberg and Timchenko had to give up the general contracting of this major pipeline, which would be something in the order of $25 billion, and give it to other people. And after that, Kaspram has been forced to cut the financing because the Chinese are not putting up the money to anybody else either. So they have really suffered quite hard, and one should not underestimate the impact of these sanctions on the people, in particular, since they have fallen up, and one kid of Rothenberg has been sanctioned also. So the U.S. authorities, that is, the U.S. pressure has turned out to be quite consistent in these sanctions, and Rothenberg has also been forced to sell admittedly to his son, one of his major most oppressed, one of his main construction companies. So they are not of a run that would be an exaggeration, but in a highly defensive position. So the U.S. sanctions do have an impact. Peter, I want to give you, because you were involved in the sanctions policy to comment on that. I just would echo what Anders said. I mean, I think if you look at the sanctions on some of the cronies of President Putin, like the Rothenberg brothers, like Mr. Timchenko, you have really seen it have an impact on their business operations.  As Anders said, he basically at the same time he was being hit by sanctions, Timchenko sold his shares. I don't know the details of that deal.  And Gunnvore, given that Timchenko is not no longer an owner of it, has broadly, I understand from various public accounts, been able to continue its business operations. But I do think that Timchenko himself has been hit quite hard. I think that's reflected in the Forbes statistics. They're also little anecdotally reports. He apparently can no longer get services or spare parts for his, I don't remember what's the Cessna. It's a U.S.-made private jet that he no longer can get spare parts for. So, you know, there are various sort of impediments of that nature, sort of practical impediments as well. And I think we're going to continue to see those impacts play out over time. I also think just to echo what Anders has said, you know, I think that there was a view last year by some of these cronies, and frankly by some Russian government officials as the sanctions came in, they'd be able to turn to the Chinese for support and relief. And that's just not what we've seen happen. I mean, at a political level there have been various political deals signed between Russia and China, including on energy. But we've, broadly speaking, at an operational business level seen individual Chinese companies avoid wanting to do business with specific sanctioned individuals like Timchenko and the Rotenberg brothers. And we've also seen, at sort of a corporate level, we've seen the Chinese prove very reluctant to actually backfill the financing, to actually kind of go in and provide financing for these projects that Western banks are no longer involved in. So I think it's actually played out, you know, as U.S. officials, broadly speaking, at Hope, that we're seeing, you know, impact both at a sort of macro business level and then also with some of these individual cronies. Let me add here, Raymond, you asked about Gunvar and I also answered about Timchenko. Gunvar has divested from Russia. They had a couple of major investment projects and they thought it was too dangerous. They thought that they were in danger of being sanctioned with the suspicion since it's a private company we can't really know who owns what. So therefore they divested from Russia and they have also stopped trading in Russian oil. So they have been very badly hit. So I think do we have time for one more question or are we, no? All right, I guess that's it. So we're going to have to wrap things up but we'll continue the discussions over coffee and whatnot. So thank you everybody. Thanks again to our panelists and... Thank you gentlemen. Very interesting discussion and complex factors affecting the Russian economy. Interesting to hear how transparent the Russian central bank is given the amount of opaque, elicit money flowing out of the economy is quite stark but issues related to exchange rate changes and commodity prices and oil prices certainly affecting the economy. We want to thank all our panelists, Dr. Ashlyn Peter Harrell, Evgeny Smulov and Clark Gascoin for his moderating. Thanks very much.


So I joined the Marine Corps when I graduated from college and I was in for about six years. When I was in the Marine Corps I was a combat engineer officer so I supervised the platoon of combat engineers and everything from demolition to route mobility to survivability and building defensive positions. I don't think I was prepared for just how much I would miss the Marines and the comrader in the Marine Corps. I just didn't have the same comradery outside of the Marine Corps that I had while I was in. But then having joined the Long Beach Fire Department it really replaced a lot of that. I don't know how to describe it but it's almost, I wouldn't say it's a lack of friendship but it's just a lack of shared purpose and a lack of shared intent. It says a man's character is his fate and it's a quote that I hold very closely to myself. It's intimidating to be a very small cog in a very big wheel right now. I think a veteran is a great fit for the fire service for a lot of different reasons. Vets are also super capable as far as the concept of self-sacrifice is concerned. They already know what it means to serve and to give of themselves as to their families. And then when you come here to the Long Beach Fire Department there are certain sacrifices that are asked of you. Whether it's spending time away from your family or whether it's really laying your life on the line for somebody who may not even know that you're out there actively trying to save them.


Abstract, this paper proposes a new method for dehumidifying air using microwaves. The microwave energy is directed towards the dipolar structure of water vapor molecules, which causes them to desorb quickly from the pores of an adsorbent material. This results in improved performance over existing methods, with up to a four-fold increase in efficiency. This article was authored by Doskhan Ibrahimkel, Chen Chen, Muhammad Burhan, and others.