 First of all, for those of you who might be a bit surprised, I'm actually from the north-east of England originally, which often surprises quite a lot of people, especially given the position that I held in the US government. But that's because of the, well, the not-so-special, I guess, relationship anymore with the UK and the US, thanks to Mr Obama's recent pronouncements, but there was at least some special areas. And I, at least, was able to take advantage of those because I'm still a dual UK-US citizen. And I also started off life as a historian. And for me, I just want to say, actually, what a privilege is actually to be here in Dublin right now on the 100th anniversary of the Easter uprising. So as a historian, I've been wandering around the park looking at all the exhibits and since Stevens and just remembering those tumultuous events, because next year will be the 100th anniversary of another big tumultuous event, the Russian Revolution. And an awful lot of questions are about what will that mean for Vladimir Putin. We were talking over lunch that there's been a lot of speculation about whether 2017 might become another momentous event because we'll have general elections, the elections for the Russian parliament this year in 2016. And in 2018, Vladimir Putin has to go up for re-election again as president. And elections actually do matter in Russia. They matter a lot more than people might think, because the nature of the Russian political system is that there is a direct relationship between the president of Russia and the people. Vladimir Putin is directly elected. And he himself has said quite recently that he hopes that St Petersburg, his hometown, will not be the other scene again of another revolution. So it's also obviously on Putin's mind that there are lots of rumours about what happens next. He will have been in power by 2018 for 18 years. He'll have been one of the longest serving Russian leaders of all time. And as you said in the introduction, Russia recently and Russian politics have become all about Putin. And in fact, the nature of the Russian presidential system, a political system now, is unprecedented in Russian modern history at least since Stalin. I'm not saying that Putin is Stalin and there's the same kind of cult of personality. But after Stalin in the 1950s and onwards, there was a collective leadership in Russia. It was dominated at various points by the general secretaries of the Communist Party. But there was a really defined collective leadership. And obviously under Yeltsin, the presidency was rather weak. And under Gorbachev, we had the great kind of flux of perestroika. When Putin was in the tandem presidential arrangement with his associate Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 until 2011 really when Putin decided he's going to come back again, September 2011, there was quite a striking degree of pluralism in the system. There were all kinds of ways in which people could be involved in debates about how Russia was actually governed and where it was going to go in the future. And that's been really dramatically changed since the return of Putin to the presidency in 2012. Partly as a reaction to the protests that we saw in the streets of Moscow, St Petersburg and some of the other cities in between the parliamentary elections of 2011 and the presidential election of 2012. There was a long reaction. There was an idea that that was an uprising. Russia is a coloured revolution that was really the perception. But I really think that we're in an unprecedented phase now as a result of everything that's happened over the last couple of years. Russia is now hyper-personalised presidency. First again for the first time in really decades of its modern history. There is still a collective leadership there. And I want to talk about that for just a few minutes. And I'd really like to leave more time for discussion with all of you about some of these issues here. But I think the collective leadership around Putin, such as it is, even if it has been somewhat eroded, as I've mentioned, points in different directions. Because the big question now is if it's so hyper-personalised, if Putin runs for re-election again in 2018 and gets elected as people assume he will be, he'll then be president until 2024. And he's got to go sometime. He himself was asked at one of the big call-in sessions on April 14. The big town hall he has where 3 million people call in and ask questions that all get to get their question answered. But he seems to do a good job of trying to approximate them. Everything from, are you going to fix my road in Tomsk and maybe in Dublin? So here you could fix as well. I've seen quite a few big holes. And then what's your relationship with world leaders? He was asked about Obama and did he regret that Obama was going to leave and Putin said thoughtfully, well, we've all got to go sometime. No point in regretting anything you've just got to keep working. So that wasn't exactly, I suppose, what the response was like. But the fact that he'd reflected on the fact we've all got to go sometime really does lead us to the issue. We're in already the post-Putin era. Somebody somewhere is thinking about it. I personally think that Putin's got his own post-Putin plan. But the question is, what is that plan likely to be? There's no way that Putin hasn't thought about the fact that he might fall down a flight of stairs, heaven forbid, or he's a man of a certain age, things happen. Presumably this won't happen, touch wood. And I'm sure that's a lot of people going around the Kremlin with the equivalent of rabbits foot and four leaf clovers and hoping that something doesn't happen. But they've got to have a plan in place. Initially the plan would be Dimitri Medvedev for three months and then candidates would emerge for the presidency. But they've got to be thinking about this 24-7. So what could this look like? Is there really a likelihood of an equivalent of an Easter uprising? Somebody basically rallying people from the streets. I think Putin's taken a lot of steps to prevent that from happening. Most recently with the announcement that he's creating a Praetorian guard, a national guard on the basis of his own personal bodyguard and some other forces that have now been brought together in a kind of a super paramilitary organisation under his direct control, under the direct control of his former bodyguard, Victor Zolotiff. There's been a whole consolidation, centralisation of other financial and legal oversight entities which all of us again suggest that Putin's make it very difficult for some alternate source of power, someone who might have presidential aspirations to be able to tap into other entities and the uniform military and instrumentalising them. So everything points into the direction of a candidate from around Putin's inner circle, the collective leadership. And that's why I wanted to talk about that for a moment because again, the collective leadership in Russia is very interesting because there isn't just one single centre of power around Putin and the different people. We all fix it, particularly in the United States, everyone's fixated on the oligarchs, Putin's friends, the guys who played judo with him or when the KGB with him. All the people who are the billionaires or hang out in London and have the big houses over there and everyone's so much focussed on them that they're not really looking at the other people who were around the presidency. So there are two groups. Putin has actually created, since the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas and then the war with Syria, a kind of a command centre, a stavka, as the Russians would call it, a high command, things of Churchill in the bunker with the key people from the security services, the people who have the assets that matter from the armed services, intelligence and other security formations and now this National Guard in and around him. What we might call the hard men of Russian politics. I'm sure many of you will know some of their names. Victor Zolotov is a former head of bodyguard who's been made a lesser member of the securities council but is still there. But people like Sergei Ivanov, the presidential chief of staff who was minister of defence and has sometimes been thought of as a potential presidential candidate, Nikolai Patrasheff, who's the head of the security council, Sergei Shoigu, the minister of defence, will go on and on about the kinds of people there. So there seem to be the guys who literally call the shots shooting at whom in Syria, the military aspects of decision making, what's been happening in Ukraine, a very tight group around Putin, seem to have been the locus of decision making on Crimea. But then on the other hand, there is a completely different group that people keep forgetting is still there, which is a team of first-rate world-class economists. And we had one of the members of this team, Xinyu Dyeva, who was actually my classmate when I first got to the US. I was at Harvard and she was at MIT. And she was also a fellow at the Brookings Institution for a while. She did a PhD in economics at MIT. She's had all kinds of different positions on the kind of equivalent of the presidential's economic advisory council. And she's now one of the deputy governors of the central bank. And she was number two at the central bank until the devaluation of the ruble. And the head of the central bank is another woman. This is the only place, actually, that are women really in the political system there. I don't think they're likely to be president of Russia, by the way. I'm just putting it out there as a kind of a different group of people, a very nabiol in it. And these are world-class economists. Those are people who are running the Russian economy. One of the triggers that is always purported for someone trying to seek to replace Putin is because he's not managing the economy well. Well, Putin doesn't manage the economy. Putin makes it very clear that these people manage the economy. I mean, the hard guys of Russian politics set the tone and, you know, obviously it's kind of a rather hard tone. But there's a whole group of people who would all be quite privileged to have running our economies. In the US, you know, kind of, we'd actually be quite lucky to have people like this because they're handling debt. They're trying to kind of figure out about how to steward the sovereign wealth funds and the assets. And they're trying to figure out about how to run a central bank and a monetary and financial system in extremis. And they've actually done remarkably well. So the IMF meetings and World Bank meetings were just the last week in Washington, D.C. and the consensus there was that the Russian economy is actually doing much better than you would believe from the headlines and they've done all the right things. And Putin hasn't moved any of them. Their equivalents in politics who were working around Medvedev in various government think tanks or in task forces for the Kremlin, many of them have left. The most famous of all of them, Alexir Kudrin, who was the finance minister, resigned famously just after Putin said he was coming back into the presidency and it looked like, you know, first of all that he'd had of falling out with Medvedev over government spending, but he was obviously displeased with the transition back and forth. But Kudrin has never gone away. Kudrin has been out and about. He's been a frequent visitor to the US meeting with high-level economists. He's been at Davos. He's been everywhere. And the talk is now that he might go back into a senior advisory position for Putin. And again, Putin raised the idea of Kudrin at this meeting. So there are a few other people, Serge Gurdiev, who's going to be the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction. Development is often cited as someone of these first-class economists who's left the country, but there's actually very few. So the reason I'm raising this is that the picture when you really look at it in Russia is actually more complicated than it appears. There's a sense that Russia has become, and it's a very palpable sense, and there's a lot of reality to it, that Russia has become much more authoritarian, but Russia has not become more autarkic. And the pressure to have a heavier hand in the economy for Russia to close down and to cut off all of its ties with the world economy as a result of the sanctions and the worsening of relationships in many respects with Europe hasn't really happened. And so that raises kind of a big question mark for me, at least, about where is this going to go into the future. Because anybody who wants to replace Putin now, I think that the bar has been raised even higher. On the one hand, he's tightened all the reins of the security apparatus around him. It's all in the hands of people who are personally close to him, people who have had close working relationships in the same cohort of men, same roughage, same general background if they weren't in the KGB with him in Leningrad, St Petersburg, he's known them since he was a child or he's worked with them in the mayor's office in St Petersburg, or as he started his career in Moscow in 1996, moving up, or he knew them from Dresden. And then you have this group of technocrats who were brought on by Putin or Kudrin, who of course worked with Putin and was the person who actually helped bring him to Moscow in 1996 in the first place, all they were brought on by Medvedev, and they're still in place. And that almost sends in defiance if anyone says, well, we need to get rid of Putin because he's not managing the economy. Because who could manage the economy better than them? Kudrin hasn't gone anywhere. Sergurif might be the European Bank for Reconstruction Development, but Sergurif alone is not going to supplant all of his other colleagues who are still there. So it seems even more than difficult to imagine a post-Putin getting back to what Patrick said, a post-Putin scenario. Because if the accusation is, you're not handling the economy you've got to go, well, you know, I don't manage the economy. These people manage the economy, their first rate. And then the other question is if there is a disaster on the security front, you know, it's all possible, but Putin has rather deftly, I think, managed to manoeuvre on the issue of Syria. You'll remember that in the United States there were particular dark predictions that Syria was going to be a quagmire for Russia. President Obama said it openly. This was going to be the next Afghanistan. And you certainly heard that from around the region as well. Crimea was one thing, Ukraine was one thing. But moving into Syria, this was definitely a real break with the past. This hadn't been done since the Soviet period in terms of any kind of major intervention. And this was bound to lead to disaster. Well, Putin has... We know he hasn't gone anywhere. The Russian military is still there, but he did the equivalent of claiming victory and success to withdraw at least expectations back at home in Russia. So that anything that happens now actually is more likely to be laid onto the West. Secretary Kerry, the United States were not really managing to pull off the peace talks in Syria. So the likelihood of a disaster, a major event upsetting everything on the security front in Syria has been somewhat reduced. It hasn't been completely eliminated. I think there's lots of things that can go wrong. But it's kind of reduced in terms of the home narrative. The other issue, just to finish on, that I think is also kind of important to bear in mind is the nature of this direct relationship between Putin and the electorate, Putin and the Russian population. Actually, matter a lot in Russian politics. They do have traction in the system through their aggregate public opinion and then their opportunity to vote. And the elections are very meaningful because Putin is rather obsessed with the law and legality and the constitution. The constitution, the Russian constitution was drawn up by Anatoly Sobchak, his mentor, the former mayor of St Petersburg, his boss and his former law professor from Leningrad State University. Sobchak was not just the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg, Leningrad, but he was actually a very famous legal historian, an expert on Russian constitutional law. Now, if you remember, the Tsarist era, they did never manage to make a constitutional monarchy. But Sobchak was an expert on the people who tried, all of the legal experts of Russian legal and political thought who had considered what he would take to create a constitutional monarchy. And Sobchak drew on all that experience when him and his team put together the Russian constitution in the early 1990s. And when I was a much younger person, I actually worked as an assistant to that group. I was the translator for the drafts of the Russian constitution into English because there was a whole host of legal professors in the United States, including Lawrence Tribe at Harvard University who were looking over the constitutional drafts. And Sergey Chakrai, one of the drafters in the group with Sobchak, when he was asked in one of these meetings if they had any external foreign models for the Russian constitution, said only the British queen. In other words, although they didn't quite accept that she didn't really have a lot of powers, but they liked this idea of a constitutional monarch. So ironically, the Russian presidency is a constitutional monarchy, but with direct election. And so for Putin, stepping back from the presidency was very important because there was only two constitutionally approved terms at that point in 2008, but very, very handily extended the terms for two years. You might remember he said it wasn't for him, but there was obviously a clear idea ahead of that. So he has the constitutional right for two more terms, but he does have to go up for reelection. And Putin's charismatic authority, his ability to keep the popular appeal is the linchpin then as a result of the whole system, whether he decides to hand it on to someone else and pass on the baton. He has to be able to pass on that popularity because whoever comes into office has to also be able to get the acclaim of the population through an electoral system. I really don't think that he seeks, or anyone else seeks to rupture that completely because that constitutionality is the one thing that really keeps the whole system, the whole political system together in the role of the presidency. So the elections in 2018 are going to matter a great deal. And this is where the whole fixation on Putin's popularity comes in and on his health and his well-being and his ability to balance everything off. And why there is so much anxiety about the idea that his ratings might fall. And if you recall, prior to the Sochi Olympics and the annexation of Crimea, of his ratings was on a downward slope, now it was still on a fantastic slope for anybody who's running for election anywhere else. It hit 64% just prior to the Sochi Olympics. But the trend had been downward from a period prior where he had had been in the 80%. And this was also the real point where it was evident that his popularity was falling as this was a trajectory that was only going in one direction was in 2010, 2011. So just in that period that he decides to come back. And it seems very clear that that fear of his waning popularity, even though he was Prime Minister, that was still the linchpin to the political system because Medvedev never made it up to those kinds of heights, was something that was one of the spurs to Putin's return. So whatever happens in the Russian political system, the Russian people will have some impact and will have some say. So as we're starting to think ahead about indicators of where it's going, it's very much like all the debates we're having now about referenda and Brexit and everything else that's going on. What the people say actually has quite an impact. And a lot of the things that you see Putin doing now, not just consolidating these levers of actual power, are really meant to appeal to the population to keep the legitimacy of the system to keep his ratings up so that even if it's him running again in 2018, it'll carry him through that tricky period. Or if he is thinking somewhere behind the scenes, he's certainly never going to tell us that maybe he might hand off to someone to be able to actually hand over that legitimacy. Because in Yeltsin, when he handed over to Putin, his popularity was rock bottom. His health was a disaster. It was just a miracle that he handed over before he keeled over. We were talking at lunch about the fact that Yeltsin had a massive heart attack between the two electoral rounds and the Russian people didn't know, but everybody outside knew. There was always that risk in the system that he would just keel over at any time and that would be a huge succession crisis. Ironically, he lives for seven years in retirement, but that was never a given. There's no way in this kind of system there's so much more to lose for everybody here that they want to risk that again. So I think we're actually in a very interesting time. On the one hand, it's all about Putin. On the other hand, it's all about what next after Putin and that's what makes it so difficult to deal with. I will end there and then hopefully we can have a discussion. Thanks so much.