Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts

Thursday, June 22, 2023

22: Africa



How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Implement Customer Referral Programs?
How Can ChatGPT Analyze Customer Feedback Data And Suggest Ways To Improve Customer Satisfaction?
How Can ChatGPT Provide Recommendations For Improving Customer Loyalty Programs?
How Can ChatGPT Suggest Ways To Use Gamification To Engage Customers?

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

24: Seagrass

A Powerful Climate Solution Just Below the Ocean’s Surface Restoring seagrass meadows is one tool that coastal communities can use to address climate change, both by capturing emissions and mitigating their effects........ They can bolster the coastlines, break the force of hurtling waves, provide housing for fish, shellfish, and migrating birds, clean the water, store as much as 5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide, and pump oxygen into the ocean, in part making it possible for life on Earth as we know it. ....... they are one of nature’s earliest floral creations: seagrasses. Anchored on the shorelines of every continent except Antarctica, these plants (and they are plants, not algae, that sprout, flower, fruit and go to seed) are one of the most powerful but unheralded climate solutions that already exist on the planet. .......... It’s estimated that a third of seagrass around the world has disappeared in the last few decades ........

“Globally, a soccer field of seagrass is lost every 30 minutes”

...... nutrient pollution, largely from agricultural runoff and wastewater, and subsequent algal blooms and die-offs, which first choke out other plants like seagrass (a process called eutrophication) and then, as they decompose, take up all the oxygen in the water (hypoxia).
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What’s Next for Russia After Spilling So Much Blood for Bakhmut? Seizing the city took 10 months and untold lives. Most likely, analysts say, Russia’s exhausted forces will settle into a defensive crouch, preparing for Ukraine’s counteroffensive. ....... The battle for the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut is essentially over, for now. After 10 months of brutal artillery duels, frantic troop advances and thousands of Russian and Ukrainian casualties, Moscow’s formations are in control of the industrial hub, while Kyiv’s troops are trying to put pressure on the city’s flanks. ...... Earlier in the battle, Moscow had hoped to use the capture of Bakhmut as a springboard for further advances to the west — aspirationally toward the larger cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. That goal seems out of reach for now. ...... Russian troops appear spent, military analysts say, after suffering extensive losses in securing Bakhmut. ........... In the south, which some military analysts predict will be the focus of Ukraine’s offensive, Russian forces have dug an intricate network of primary and secondary trench lines and minefields to thwart any Ukrainian advance ........ If Ukraine does manage to retake territory, analysts say, that could give Russia’s far larger air force an upper hand as Ukrainian troops push forward, outside the range of their air defenses. ....... To the north, Ukrainian-backed proxy units have penetrated the Russian border in recent days, seizing a small batch of territory in what is considered a propaganda move to tie up Russian forces and embarrass the Kremlin following the seizure of Bakhmut........... Russian forces were defeated on three fronts last year — around Kyiv, in the northeastern Kharkiv region and at Kherson. Moscow is nursing its exhausted and casualty-ridden formations after brutal urban combat in Bakhmut. Ukraine, too, is plagued by casualties, but is digging in along far more favorable and higher terrain outside Bakhmut....... The head of the Wagner paramilitary force, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, whose fighters were primarily responsible for the seizure of Bakhmut, has pledged to pull them from the city and turn its defense over to Russia’s uniformed ranks, risking a disorganized turnover of troops....... Western estimates early this year put Russia’s casualties in wounded and dead at about 200,000 since its invasion, and Ukraine’s are thought to be similar .



Four Forces Bind Trump’s Supporters More Tightly Than Ever Reckoning with their enduring adherence to a broken man ........ During a CNN town hall earlier this month, Donald Trump acted as expected. He used the phrase “wack job” to describe E. Jean Carroll, who was awarded $5 million in damages because a jury unanimously concluded that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her. His statement elicited applause and laughter from the mostly pro-Trump crowd. He also described the January 6 insurrection as a “beautiful day” and declared that, if reelected president in 2024, he would pardon a “large portion” of the rioters. Those statements, too, brought applause from the raucous audience............. There was more. Trump called the Black police officer who had shot and killed one of the rioters storming the Capitol a “thug,” falsely claiming that the officer had bragged about the incident. Trump defended taking top-secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate. He wouldn’t say whether he hoped that Ukraine would win the war against Russia. And he spewed lie after lie after lie about the 2020 election and virtually every other topic that came up. ........ As the CNN anchor Jake Tapper said of Trump, summing up the night, “He declared war on the truth, and I’m not sure that he didn’t win.” ......... The day after the town hall, I asked a person in the talk-radio world how his listeners had responded. “One hundred percent approval of Trump’s performance,” this individual, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me. “I even tried to get people to call me who didn’t think he did well, but no luck. And I received a number of calls saying they had been either leaning towards [Ron] DeSantis or were firmly in his camp, and they said they have now decided to fully support Trump, based on the town hall.”

‘Time Shelter’ Wins International Booker Prize Georgi Gospodinov’s acclaimed satire, translated by Angela Rodel, is the first Bulgarian novel to win the prestigious award. ........ “Time Shelter,” a novel in which a wave of nostalgia sweeps Europe and entire countries consider living in past eras ......... A complex novel, “Time Shelter” centers on a psychiatrist who creates a clinic in Switzerland to help people with Alzheimer’s disease. The clinic includes spaces that recreate past eras in intricate detail to help patients retain their memories, and the experiment proves so successful that the idea is taken up far beyond the hospital’s walls. .......... the book was also “a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison.”......... when reading “Time Shelter” it was impossible “not to think of the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit and MAGA and even Putin’s Greater Russia irredentism.” ........ “thrust him into the forefront of his generation of Bulgarian writers, the first to emerge after the country’s transition to democracy.” ........ His novel “The Physics of Sorrow” followed a protagonist in the saddest country in the world — inspired by Western clichรฉs about the temperament of Eastern Europeans. ......... Gospodinov said “Time Shelter” looked beyond his country’s borders and was inspired by the global turn toward populism. “I come from a system that sold a ‘bright future’ under communism,” he said. “Now the stakes have shifted, and

populists are selling a ‘bright past.’

.... “I know via my own skin that both checks bounce,” Gospodinov added. “They are backed by nothing.”


Cleopatra’s Daughter Led a Life as Eventful as Her Mother’s A new biography by Jane Draycott shines a light on an African queen whose career has been overshadowed by that of her famous forebear.

Anti-Kremlin Fighters Take War to Russian Territory for a Second Day The cross-border attacks by fighters aligned with Ukraine were an effort to force Russia’s military to divert troops from the front line, an official said. ....... Ukraine has denied any direct involvement in the incursions, casting the border attacks as a sign of internal division in Russia. A Ukrainian deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, described the fighters as “Russian patriots” rebelling against President Vladimir V. Putin’s government....... A group called the Free Russia Legion, made up of Russians who have taken up arms for Ukraine, claimed responsibility for taking the war to Russian territory. The volunteer unit operates under the umbrella of Ukraine’s International Legion, forces overseen by Ukrainian officers. .......... Ilya Ponomarev, an exiled former member of the Russian Parliament who described himself as the political representative of the legion, said by telephone on Tuesday that the incursions were an effort to force Moscow’s military to divert troops fighting in Ukraine and to destabilize Mr. Putin’s government by showing its inability to defend its long border with Ukraine........ In March, the Russian Volunteer Corps said it had staged a brief incursion into villages in the Russian region of Bryansk, and the Kremlin’s Security Council called an emergency session. ....... The corps is led by a Russian nationalist in exile and is part of a motley collection of Russians who oppose Mr. Putin’s rule........ “Some of the more hawkish segments of Russian society will see these attacks as another sign of the Kremlin’s weakness and incompetence,” he said. “So Putin can potentially lose some popularity among those who strongly support the war.”...... Yuriy Karin, an analyst with a group debunking Russian propaganda, said that after years of Russia’s denying its military interventions in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine may now be doing the same in southern Russia.

Thursday, April 06, 2023

6: Russia



Macron’s China Trip Is a Fool’s Errand Feeling the heat at home, the French president heads to China to ink some lucrative deals and pay lip service to Xi’s pledges of peace. .

Xi and Macron Call for Ukraine Peace Talks, but the Path Is Murky It is not clear that the Chinese and French leaders — much less Russia and Ukraine — have compatible terms for talks or peace, and Mr. Xi has not publicly agreed to pressure Moscow to negotiate. ....... Mr. Macron told Mr. Xi that he was counting on him “to bring Russia back to reason and everyone back to the negotiating table” on Ukraine. ........ He said that “together with France, we appeal for reason and restraint” in the conflict. China was seeking “a resumption of peace talks as soon as possible,” he said, and, in an apparent nod to Russian concerns over NATO’s expansion eastward, “a European security architecture that is balanced, effective and lasting.” ........... “a joint call with France for the international community,” he said that China “appeals for the protection of civilians. Nuclear weapons must not be used, and nuclear war must not be fought.” ......... There have been no known peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv since last April, and each side insists it has no interest in a cease-fire, setting preconditions that are anathema to the other. ......... Any halt in fighting, Mr. Zelensky has said, would simply solidify the Kremlin’s control of the area it has seized and reward its aggression. ............. If Ukrainian forces recapture enough occupied land in the south to reach the border of Crimea, Kyiv would be willing to discuss the status of the peninsula with Moscow ......... the only open question on Crimea was whether Russia left voluntarily or by force. ....... Western nations are wary that the war could drag on for years, or that losses on the ground could prompt Mr. Putin to escalate. ........ “President Xi reiterated his willingness to speak when conditions and the time are right” with Mr. Zelensky. ....... China and Russia declared they had a “no-limits” friendship last year, though a Chinese ambassador recently downplayed that statement. Mr. Xi said last month that Russia and China were together ushering in a “new era” that puts an end to what the two countries see as American dominance. ........... Mr. Macron is determined, in his words, to build “a strategic and global partnership with China.” ......... China, for its part, has embarked on a charm offensive toward France, and to some degree the 27-nation European Union, and offered Mr. Macron an elaborate and flattering reception — marching bands, a 21-gun salute, a review of troops and a long walk side by side with Mr. Xi on a red carpet leading into the vast building at the western edge of Tiananmen Square. Mr. Xi will spend at least six hours with Mr. Macron in Beijing and Guangzhou on Friday, treatment described by Western diplomats as exceptional and a clear statement of conciliatory intent. ........ The United States increasingly sees China as not only an economic and political rival but an adversary and a security threat, and has tried with mixed success to win its European allies over to that view. ...... Beijing would like to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, a consistent theme during Mr. Macron’s visit. Mr. Xi, for example, said China supports Mr. Macron’s quest for European “strategic autonomy,” shorthand for some European distancing from the United States. .........

“China considers Europe to be an independent pole in a multipolar world,” Mr. Xi said.

......... he does not view America’s alliance with Europe as a defining feature of the continent in a 21st century that China seeks to shape. .......... “Playing up the ‘democracy vs. authoritarianism’ narrative and stoking a new Cold War will only bring division and confrontation to the world,” it said. ......... Europe’s hard-hit economy needs the Chinese market, and Europe provides major economic opportunities to China that are not readily available in Russia. ........ Mr. Xi borrowed some of the French president’s favorite phrases, speaking of changed “strategic architecture,” freed from “bloc confrontation,” and offering European “strategic autonomy.” ....... The hard part is knowing what all this means, how it might be applied, and what place the United States, France’s oldest ally, would have in such a world.
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Ivanka Trump Is Pained

See the rebirth of California’s ‘phantom’ Tulare Lake in striking before-and-after images A once-mighty body of water is rising again in Central California. ......... Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River and was last full in 1878. It was mostly drained in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as its tributaries were dammed and diverted for agriculture.

This phantom lake in California is back with a vengeance Tulare Lake has filled and dried up at many points in history. But this time, towns and farms stand in the way. ...... Tulare Lake, a so-called phantom lake, once the largest freshwater body west of the Mississippi, is quickly reviving due to California’s extreme levels of precipitation. While an influx of water is a relief to many, easing the drought and refilling reservoirs, it spells disaster for other parts of the state. ...... Tulare Lake was once a permanent feature of San Joaquin Valley. It covered an estimated 790 square miles, creating a biodiverse wetlands ecosystem encompassing approximately 10 percent of California. In the late 1800s, settlers began diverting Tulare’s tributaries for agricultural purposes, incrementally drying the lake and exposing nutrient-rich soil. ....... Now, the lake-turned-farmland is one of the most important agricultural regions in the state and is home to hundreds of thousands of Californians. But as of March 31, current precipitation levels in Tulare Lake Basin exceed the wettest years on record, 1968 and 1969. Residents are already seeing vast amounts of water overwhelm their houses, barns, and fields–and it’s only just beginning. If current conditions keep up, says UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, this may be the worst flood for the Lake Tulare Basin yet. ....... Prior to water diversion, Tulare Lake was estimated to be about 37 feet deep. Shallow lakes evaporate much faster than deep lakes, owing to their larger surface area to volume ratio, allowing the sun to heat up and evaporate the water quickly. California’s hot, dry climate makes its phantom lakes especially ephemeral. ....... Tulare Lake was once a permanent feature of the San Joaquin valley. It’s a natural watershed for the Sierra Nevada and multiple rivers. Today, levees and dams limit the amount of water that can enter the Tulare Lake Basin. Although in the face of such an extreme influx of water, these systems can only do so much. .........

Despite the already significant flood issues, most of the water that will enter the Lake Tulare Basin hasn’t done so yet

............ Rain and snow create the flood, but rising temperatures intensify it. ....... This year, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is three times larger than normal and still growing. As of April 3, 2023, the estimated snowpack for the southern Sierras is 303 percent above average......... In the coming weeks, the Tulare Lake Basin and larger San Joaquin Valley will, unfortunately, experience deeper and more widespread flooding, potentially seeping into urban areas. ........ “There’s just that much water up in the mountains, it can’t go anywhere else, right?” he says, “…In the end, the water always wins.” ......... whatever water enters the basin sits there until it evaporates. An impermeable layer of clay underneath the former lake prevents most water from exiting through the ground. ........ In the last big flood event in 1982 and 1983, the second wettest years in recorded history, the lake did not fully disappear until 1985 ........ The San Joaquin valley has a long history of water wars, and there is no single entity with the authority to make these changes. Private landowners are responsible for many of these decisions.


How to pre-sell your online course .

Wednesday, April 05, 2023

5: Russia



How to win the hot war in Ukraine and the cold war that will follow it After a year of fighting, what comes next?



Everywhere Ventures Bucks Trend by Investing Globally The firm leverages its network of about 500 limited-partner investors to find deals far and wide ......... Jenny Fielding and Scott Hartley, managing partners of Everywhere Ventures, are pursuing a domestic and international investment strategy as U.S. venture capitalists have taken a step back from deals abroad........ The managers of Everywhere Ventures, formerly called The Fund, say they have found an efficient way for a two-person team to invest a small fund in geographically diverse early-stage startups. The firm uses technology to activate hundreds of individual limited partners and connect them with portfolio company founders globally. Its local networks help the managers source and vet deals, while keeping the firm’s operating expenses low.

Putin Should Have Read Evan Gershkovich, Not Imprisoned Him Putin has no independent sources of reliable information. He refuses to read news stories on the internet, fearing it might be used to spy on him. Battlefield information is filtered — and laundered — through layers of military bureaucracy and takes days to reach him. Past military successes in Georgia and Crimea made him overconfident, and the pandemic turned him into a paranoid recluse. On the eve of the invasion, neither his foreign minister nor his domestic-policy chief was aware of the war about to come. .............. And, like despots through the ages, he listens only to people who tell him what he wants to hear. One of them, the oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, The Journal reported, “assured Mr. Putin that Ukrainians saw themselves as Russian, and would welcome the invading soldiers with flowers.” Putin is godfather to one of Medvedchuk’s daughters. .......... Government statistics are massaged to hide bad news. Every bureaucracy, including the domestic intelligence services, has its own agendas and reality-distorting prisms. ........ By now it should be clear that Putin is living inside a manufactured reality .......... Diplomatic remonstrations won’t puncture his fantasy bubble, but another tranche of Abrams tanks to Ukraine might. ........ Putin has sought to wage a disinformation campaign in the West for decades. Western news organizations can repay his abuses with an information campaign about Russia, in Russian, for Russians. They, too, deserve to have the benefit of facts Putin wants nobody — including even himself — to know.

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers Russia’s president built a power structure designed to deliver him the information he wants to hear, feeding into his miscalculations on the Ukraine war ......... Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow. It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat. The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation ........ His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm ......... The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches. .......... Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news. ........... Through the summer, delegations of military experts and arms manufacturers emerged from presidential meetings questioning whether Mr. Putin understood the reality on the battleground ........ the president remains surrounded by an administration that caters to his conviction that Russia will succeed, despite the mounting human and economic sacrifices. ....... “The people around Putin protect themselves” ..... “They have this deep belief that they shouldn’t upset the president.” ......... Over time, Mr. Putin, who has never served in the military, has become so wary of his own command structure that he has issued orders directly to the front line. ........ an isolated leader who was unable, or unwilling, to believe that Ukraine would successfully resist. The president, these people said, spent 22 years constructing a system to flatter him by withholding or sugarcoating discouraging data points. ............ The president increasingly speaks of Russia in near-religious terms, as a 1,000-year-old civilization waging a holy struggle that will right historical wrongs and elevate him into a pantheon of conquering czarist leaders such as Peter the Great............. Though contact between the U.S. and Russia occurs almost every day, whether through their embassies, the Pentagon or the CIA, those conversations have become constrained ......... have found some of Mr. Putin’s closest allies to be even more hard-line than the authoritarian leader himself. ........... Putin wakes daily around 7 a.m. to a written briefing on the war, with information carefully calibrated to emphasize successes and play down setbacks ............ He has long refused to use the internet for fear of digital surveillance ........... making him more dependent on briefing documents compiled by ideologically aligned advisers. ......... Battlefield updates can take several days to reach Mr. Putin’s desk, leaving them often out of date ....... Front-line commanders report to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor to the KGB, which edits reports for experts at the Security Council, who pass them to Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, the arch hawk who helped persuade Mr. Putin to invade Ukraine. He, in turn, passes the reports to Mr. Putin. ............. Mr. Putin, current and former Russian officials and people close to the Kremlin say, remains fully committed to bringing Ukraine to heel and is ready to mobilize Russia’s economy and population for years to succeed. If Western arms shipments and economic support flag, and Ukrainian morale dips, he could still emerge, on balance, as the victor in what is already the largest war in Europe since World War II. ............ After three days of quarantine and three PCR tests, the executives sat at the end of a long wooden table, listening as Mr. Putin described a war effort he considered a success. Ukrainians were only motivated to fight, he told them, because their army was shooting deserters ............ Then Mr. Putin turned to Chief of General Staff for the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov, who said Russian weapons were successfully hitting their targets and the invasion was going according to plan. The arms makers left the meeting with a sense that Mr. Putin lacked a clear picture of the conflict ............ who supports the war, said in an interview that the president “proceeded from an incomplete understanding of the situation and in some ways not fully correct.” ......... The war planners, he said, “clearly underestimated the strength of the enemy and overestimated their own.” ......... Mr. Putin needed only days to roll through more than a fifth of Georgia in 2008, and weeks to take Ukraine’s peninsula of Crimea in 2014— ...........

The Russian president came to see the Crimea operation as a personal triumph.

His inner circle gradually shrank down to his most hawkish advisers, who assured Mr. Putin Russian forces would seize Kyiv within days. ............. “He probably forgot that when he was a KGB operative he was lying to his boss,” said Indrek Kannik, a former head of analysis for Estonian foreign intelligence. ......... Diplomats at the mission learned during Mr. Putin’s two-decade rule to feed Moscow the story it wanted to hear ........ Junior officials and senior directors knew that to win plaudits and promotions they should exaggerate good news and play down the bad, for fear of upsetting “papa,” a nickname for Mr. Putin, once used for Russian czars. ............... The seeds of Mr. Putin’s overconfidence against Kyiv were planted in 2014, when his most senior war planners advised him not to seize Crimea. .............. Pro-Western protesters had overwhelmed riot police in central Kyiv, prompting Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Vyktor Yanukovich to flee. Mr. Putin summoned his security chiefs to the Kremlin for an all-night operation to exfiltrate Mr. Yanukovich to Russia. Shortly before sunrise, Mr. Putin told his staff he had resolved to take Crimea, the predominantly Russian-speaking peninsula, he said in a 2015 documentary. ............. After a swift and nearly bloodless victory, his poll ratings soared above 80%. The Kremlin contrasted the weekslong operation to czarist Russia’s painful defeat in the 19th century’s yearslong Crimean War. .................. In 2018, Mr. Putin, who began to speak of Russia as a military power equal to the U.S., gave his annual state of the union speech in front of a screen showing nuclear weapons striking what appeared to be Florida. “Nobody listened to Russia,” he said. “Well, listen up now.” ................ Mr. Putin was becoming more reclusive and consulted a shrinking roster of old allies. When Sergei Kirienko, Kremlin domestic politics chief, gathered the full presidential team together in 2019, Mr. Putin lectured them for hours on Russian sovereignty and his views. “They left feeling like he was talking to himself” ............. When Covid arrived in 2020, the health-conscious Mr. Putin retreated from his usual residence in the Moscow suburbs to a remote estate near Lake Valdai, 250 miles from the capital, and the presidential summer residence in Sochi on the Black Sea............. There, he spent extended time with his old friend and media mogul Yuri Kovalchuk, who quarantined nearby, and the pair theorized over a shared idea of a restored Great Russia ............. As the circle tightened, Mr. Putin became increasingly paranoid, convinced that the U.S. was stationing nuclear weapons in Ukraine ............ July 2021, Mr. Putin published a 6,917-word historical essay on the Ukrainian nation .......... From inside Ukraine, a Kremlin-connected businessman was telling Mr. Putin what he wanted to hear. Viktor Medvedchuk, a Russia-funded politician, had made Mr. Putin godfather to his daughter Darya. For years, Mr. Medvedchuk had a dedicated line to reach the president—a phone with a Russian number and a secure calling app the Ukrainians called Kremlyovka, in reference to the Kremlin ............ Mr. Medvedchuk assured Mr. Putin that Ukrainians saw themselves as Russian, and would welcome the invading soldiers with flowers ......... Meanwhile, the FSB was tweaking polling data to convince Mr. Putin that Ukrainians would welcome Russian soldiers ......... War planning fell to the FSB more than the military, according to the former Russian intelligence officer and a person close to the defense ministry. The ministry kept normal working hours in the weeks leading up to the invasion, with little sense of the urgency. .............. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Mr. Peskov; his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov; chief of staff, Anton Vaino; and Mr. Kirienko, the domestic policy chief, weren’t aware of the plans ......... Fifteen days into the war, after his quick strike on Kyiv failed, Mr. Putin scowled in a gold-embroidered armchair as his defense minister briefed him over a video link in a televised meeting. ....... “Vladimir Vladimirovich, everything is going to plan,” said Mr. Shoigu. “We report this to you every day.”