a pleasure to see all old friends from the intelligence community, from the think tank and world of academia and other agencies around town. and even some media friends i have made over the years, so thank you for having me today. in the interest of time i'm going to cut right to the chase, and try to identify a core question. and give you my thoughts on that core question and hopefully frame the discussion that we have on the panel, but also during the q and a. so the core question i have been thinking a lot about is what exactly is putin going to do in the next six years, now that he has won reelection? does have a strategy? what does he really seek to achieve during this timeframe? i'm not even going to get into -- some of you may have seen that is the rate of chechnya. somebody might want to put in the constitution for 2024, that is a whole subject unto itself. i'm going to focus on the next six years. so if i look -- by the way, i think everybody will become a russia expert. it is impossible not to pick up a newspaper and everybody has an opinion on putin. so i'm just one of them. i spe