World Conspiracy Report to the Federation Council

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

M. V. Kovalchuk, director of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute". A meaningful report on the threats to the energy structure, on politics, on science, on the propaganda of the unnatural - and on the ways out.

Good afternoon, dear colleagues!

Valentina Ivanovna, first of all I want to thank you and colleagues for the opportunity to speak in such an important, significant and significant audience.

I thought for a long time what to devote the report to, and decided to talk in a sense about the future. This idea of mine is backed up by the day before yesterday's speech by the President of our country at the United Nations, where he explicitly said about some nature-like technologies, so I want to devote my report to this. (Please, first slide.)

You know, you and I live in such a situation when in recent years we have only heard about crises: the mortgage crisis, the economic crisis, the banking crisis. And few people think that in fact it is only the outer shell of what is happening somewhere in the depths. In fact, civilization is going through a deep, perhaps the most difficult crisis in the entire history of its existence. The matter is connected with the fact that we live in a high-tech world, our whole life, civilization is based on high technologies. And the crisis of that civilizational base, that is, in fact, science, determines what we see and discuss. I will try to clarify this.

When I was a teenager (this was many years ago), I came across a book by a French writer Vercors called "The Silence of the Sea". Maybe you've seen a French movie about it. The book is generally about love, but this novel was so interesting that I looked to see if this writer still had anything. This Vercourt has a book called The Quota, or Abundance Supporters. This book says almost 60 years ago that humanity, after World War II, launched a new economic system called "expanded reproduction": consume, throw away, buy new. In fact, a machine for the destruction of natural resources was turned on. And if this machine serves only the countries of the "golden billion", the world's resources will be enough for an infinitely long period. (This was said 60 years ago.) And as soon as one country, such as India, reaches the level of energy consumption equal to that of the United States 60 years ago, the world will experience an economic, energy collapse.

This is what we see today, and we must clearly understand that this is precisely the problem. And in fact, if we live in the paradigm in which we are today, then after a certain period of time civilization should, having preserved, I don’t know, the wheel, fire, cattle breeding, return to primitive existence.

I will explain this in more detail. Take a look at the global challenges of the 21st century. Today, what is called sustainable development is associated with actually sufficient, but practically unlimited consumption of energy and resources. Global involvement in technological development of more and more countries and regions in the global world leads to more and more intensive consumption, and in fact to the destruction of natural resources. Before our very eyes, the "golden billion" was supplemented by China and India, half of the world's population switched from bicycles to cars. In fact, a resource collapse has come. The question is whether it will happen tomorrow or with some, so to speak, time shift - this is the second question. But the struggle for dwindling resources has become the dominant feature of world politics. We can see this very well.

I would like to emphasize two very important things.

First. Leadership today is provided by technological superiority; in fact, military colonization has been replaced by technological enslavement. And, which is extremely important, developed countries fall under this colonization in the first place.

What is the reason for this crisis, why did it happen? Look, our nature has existed for billions of years in an absolutely harmonious self-consistent form: the sun is shining, its energy is converted through photosynthesis into chemical energy, and the entire system - bio-, geo- - for billions of years lives harmoniously, absolutely self-sufficient, without resource deficit. You and I have built the technosphere, which is the basis of our civilization, in fact, over the past 150-200 years. And what happened? There is one figure: the total amount of oxygen that has been consumed by the entire civilization until our time is 200 billion tons. We have exterminated the same amount of oxygen in 50 years.

The question is as follows. Imagine, before we invented the steam engine, we were, our technological life, civilization was part of the general technosphere, muscle strength plus the power of wind and water. We have not disturbed the balance in nature. Then we came up with a steam engine, then electricity and built a technosphere that is completely antagonistic to nature. This means that, in fact, the cause of the crisis is in the contradiction, antagonism between nature and the technosphere created by man. And this has happened over the past decade in fact. This is the reason for the crisis.

Therefore, now I can tell you: humanity is in a very difficult situation, before a choice. In fact, we are faced with the problem of what will happen to humanity next, and it is very deep. Therefore, the choice of priorities today for civilization as a whole and for each specific sovereign country is the most important thing. All priorities can be roughly divided into two parts. There are tactical priorities that keep us alive today. If we do not produce medicines or food or modernize the army, we will lose everything today and will not be able to survive. But if we do not think about strategic challenges, then tomorrow we will disappear. I will illustrate this with a very simple example.

We recently celebrated the 70th anniversary of our Great Victory in World War II. Imagine, the Soviet Union on May 9, 1945 was the winner. We had the most powerful, most technologically equipped, most efficient army in the world; we were the rulers of the world. But in August of the same year, after the explosion in Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the atomic bomb, if we were not engaged in the atomic project, then our victory would have been devalued, we would have simply disappeared as a state. Therefore, solving the problems of creating weapons, winning the war, our state made deep decisions to implement in the most difficult conditions of war the strategic priority, which today gave us the opportunity to survive as a sovereign state. And you and I must understand that only because of this today we are living in a sovereign state, thanks to the fact that atomic weapons, submarines and missiles were created - the means of their delivery. (Please, look at this picture, the atomic project.) Moreover, what was important - in the most difficult conditions of the war, no one discussed anything. Atomic weapons were created. Nobody talked about innovation, about economic benefits. They made an atomic weapon, a bomb, to survive. But when you respond to a strategically important challenge, you are blowing up civilization for many decades, changing its appearance and face and creating a fundamentally new technological order.

Look, from this bomb atomic energy first emerged. In 1954, Kurchatov turned the bomb and created the world's first nuclear power plant (this is the date of birth of nuclear power in the world), the Obninsk nuclear power plant. Then the logic of the development of nuclear energy led us to fusion. And today the whole world, having added 10 billion in the south of France, is realizing our idea, which was first realized in 1954 at the Kurchatov Institute, a tokamak is being created. Even the word is Russian. This is a future source of energy based on thermonuclear fusion, fusion, not fission, as it is today.

Then this bomb was turned into a nuclear power device, and in 1958 our first submarine was created, and a year later - the world's first nuclear icebreaker. And today we are out of competition at high latitudes on the shelf, in the Arctic. At the same time, factories that build nuclear submarines have no alternative to create platforms for oil and gas production on the shelf. And the first such platform - Prirazlomnaya - was created.

And now I want to draw your attention … I'm not even talking about space, that further movement into space is connected with nuclear energy to a significant extent. I will draw your attention to a simple thing. Look, we all use computers. And no one thought that, in general, the computer and computational mathematics arose only because it was necessary to calculate the thermophysical characteristics of neutron reactors and the trajectory of an exit into space. Therefore, computational mathematics and computers arose. And supercomputers today, which form the basis of our developments, arose in response to the ban on nuclear weapons testing. We agreed with the Americans. We stopped doing in Semipalatinsk, they are in Nevada. But this test has moved to a supercomputer, which only arose for this reason.

Well, then, we are looking today - nuclear medicine, isotopes, accelerators, neutron reactors. The entire research world base has grown out of the atomic project.

In concluding this story, I want to tell you that if you solve a strategic problem, it blows up civilization, it turned the Soviet Union into a superpower and today retained our sovereignty, but at the same time it gave birth to a new high-tech economy. Today we are practically, for example, the only country that has a full atomic cycle. One country is us. And we have actually created dozens of industries … If you evaluate these markets, they are the dominant, high-tech markets in the world, and we play key roles in them.

Therefore, the choice of a strategic priority is a key issue for the development prospects of any state, primarily one like ours.

And today we are faced with this crisis. There are two ways out of it. The first way out is to move as it is, through a series of bloody wars for redistribution and access to resources, which is already underway. We will practically come to a primitive state. Or the second option is to create a fundamentally new technological base of nature-like technologies, that is, in fact, to include technologies in the chain of a closed resource turnover, self-sufficient, which exists in nature.

Show the next slide.

Take a look at this picture. In fact (I have already spoken about this), the Sun is a thermonuclear source. Its energy in the minimum part (tenths, hundredths of a percent) is processed by photosynthesis into other types of energy, and then all this ensures the life of the entire complex, the Earth.

I want to draw your attention: the highest achievement, natural, is our human brain. At the same time, our brain consumes an average of 10 watts, during peak minutes - 30 watts. It's like a light bulb in the toilet of a communal apartment. And the supercomputers that we, for example, make and use … today, at the Kurchatov Institute, one of the most powerful supercomputers consumes tens of megawatts. But the power of all computers in the world just last year equaled the power of the brain of one person. This is direct evidence of the incorrectness of our technological movements.

I want to say that it is very easy for me to speak today, because the President of our country, speaking … Here is a quote. When he had already finished discussing the current political situation (Syria, Ukraine), he returned to emissions and said that we need to look at the problem more broadly: set quotas for harmful emissions, use other tactical measures.

“We may, for some time, remove the problem, but, of course, we will not fundamentally solve it. And we need qualitatively different approaches. exist with it in complete harmony and will help restore the balance between the biosphere and the technosphere disturbed by man. This is truly a challenge on a planetary scale. End of quote.

Please, next slide.

Now I want to say that this very capacious quotation from the President's speech at the United Nations has a very deep, long-developing basis for the development of science itself. Look, if we look at the natural course of the development of science, what happened: the shift of emphasis to the "living". If a certain number of years ago 90 percent of publications were devoted to semiconductors, today almost the lion's share of scientific publications is devoted to the science of "living" - bioorganics. This is the first thing. That is, the transfer of interest to "living things", to biology.

Second. In science, ligaments have appeared. They appeared long ago, and now there are a huge number of them - biophysics, geophysics, biochemistry, even neuroeconomics and neurophysiology. What does this mean? The scientific community was pregnant with this interdisciplinarity. She lacked these narrow disciplines, and she began to create such transitions, interfaces, science links. And, what is also very important - the output of interdisciplinary research in technology. Here's a look at how technology works today. Very simple. You take, a simple example, a log, chop off branches. You have a log, you can fold the frame. Processed further - timber, even further - lining, and so on. Next, what do we do with metal? We extract ore, smelt an ingot, put it on the machine, cut off the excess, make a part. Up to 90 percent of material resources and energy is used to create waste and pollute the environment. This is how technology works today.

And there are already new additive technologies, they are heard, I think you have heard about it, when you now create parts naturally, growing them in fact. You can grow, you can do biological things first. For example, prostheses are made, bone replacement. You are growing parts of the human body. It starts with 3D printing, and, in fact, these are additive technologies. And today you can create parts for any purpose in this additive way, not cutting off the excess, but building up. And these are nature-like technologies.

Hence the conclusion. Today we have no other way out of a strategic goal, which is nature-like, - a transition to a strategic priority. The new strategic priority of scientific and technological development is the integration, fusion of sciences and technological development of the results of interdisciplinary research. And the basis for this is the advanced development of fundamentally new interdisciplinary convergent fundamental research and interdisciplinary education.

But I would like to devote the rest of the time to telling or talking about threats. You see, we live in a complex, rapidly changing world. And what to do is absolutely obvious, understandable, and we are ready for this, I will talk about this later. But we must pay attention to the threats, global challenges that nature-like technologies are fraught with.

Look: we, on the one hand, are moving on to the technological reproduction of living nature. And this is clear. This will enable us to create technologies that will be part of the natural cycle, without disrupting it. And in this sense, we will restore, as the President said, the natural metabolism in nature. But there is a possibility of purposeful interference in human life, even in the process of evolution.

These threats related to interference can be clearly divided into two blocks. The first is biogenetic based on nanobiotechnology. That is, you can create artificial living systems with given properties, including those that do not exist in nature.

I'll give you a simple example. Here we are creating, for example, an artificial cell. This artificial cage is, on the one hand, medically important. She can be a diagnostician, she can be a targeted drug delivery person. But on the other hand, it can also be harmful, right? And then, in fact, one cell, which has a genetic code and self-develops, is a weapon of mass destruction. At the same time, thanks to the achievements of modern genetics, you can create this cell, ethnogenetically oriented towards a specific ethnic group. It can be safe for one ethnic group and harmful, fatal for another. This is the first obvious type of danger in the emergence of a fundamentally new weapon of mass destruction.

And the second thing. We are developing cognitive research, this is research on the study of the brain, consciousness. This means that, in fact, an opportunity opens up for influencing the psychophysiological sphere of a person, and it is very easy and simple. I can talk about this for a long time and in detail, but I will tell you only one thing. In fact, on the one hand, it is very important for medicine, for everything else, because you can make bioprostheses, you can create an eye control system for paralyzed people, and so on. But, on the other hand, there is a feedback from brain-machine interfaces or brain interfaces, when you can create a false picture of reality inside a person, like a soldier, an operator, and so on. That is, it is a very subtle and complex thing - the control of individual and mass consciousness. And you and I see what is happening at the level of mass consciousness, say, with the help of the Internet.

Now I would like to summarize what I have said and emphasize the following. When I talked about nuclear energy, there is a dual nature of technologies: there is military application, there is civilian one. And you know for sure: this nuclear power plant generates heat and electricity, while weapons-grade plutonium is produced here. Moreover, at a distance, by measuring the neutrino flux, I can monitor the state of the reactor and say for sure whether weapons-grade plutonium is being produced or not.

Farther. What have you got from a nuclear explosion? Temperature, shock wave, plus radiation. We control all this today. Therefore, complete control over the non-proliferation of technologies of mass destruction. And here, in the likeness of nature, the dual nature of technologies from the very beginning. The boundaries between civilian and military use are blurred, and as a result, the existing methods of control are completely ineffective. I tell you: every development is of a medical nature. Why is there a surge in medicine today? Because medicine today is the correct civilian application, but the second automatically exists, and they are almost indistinguishable.

The second danger is the availability and relative cheapness in comparison with nuclear technologies, the possibility of creating weapons of destruction even in artisanal conditions and the absence of the need for delivery vehicles. Just imagine, an atomic bomb was created 60–70 years ago. Since then, no one (although everything is written in the textbook) has made atomic weapons. Everyone who has it was given it either by the Americans or by the Soviet Union. Nobody did. Why? Ask yourself a question. And because for this you need to have colossal science, deep traditions, colossal industry, economic power. This is beyond the power of any state. And therefore (although everything is written in the textbook) they took two pieces of uranium-235, created a critical mass - here's a bomb for you. And everything is known. And nobody did. But in these technologies it can be done in the kitchen: you need to get a cage and control, that is, it is very simple. And from here you have two things: you must think about a fundamentally new system of international security, because there is another important thing - you cannot predict the consequences of the release of artificially created living systems into the environment, how they will disrupt the evolutionary process.

Farther. I will not go into details. Here are examples of what work is being done by the American agency DARPA, for example, in this area - on mind control, on the creation of ethnogenetic systems. If you read only the names, it is enough to understand what the scale of this activity is.

Farther. And from here, what is the danger? There is a danger of the possibility of one-sided possession of these technologies, by one party, and their use.

And I want to very briefly, without going into details, remind you that we began to prepare answers to these challenges in accordance with the presidential initiative on the strategy for the development of the nanotechnology industry back in 2007. I leave the stages aside, so to speak, the innovative part. As for the commercial development of nanotechnology, I want to say that over the years, a fundamentally new research base, a network structure in the country has been created, and we have come to the implementation of the task of the third stage, announced in 2007, which should lead to the creation in the Russian Federation of a fundamentally new technological basis of the economy on base of products of nanobiotechnology and nature similarity.

Next slide.

I just want to show you … I invite you all, Valentina Ivanovna, maybe hold some meeting at the Kurchatov Institute to see what has been created at the Kurchatov Institute over the past five to seven years in accordance with the President's instructions. We have created an unparalleled Center for Convergent Sciences and Technologies based on mega-installations, the only source of synchrotron radiation in the post-Soviet space, a neutron research reactor and a powerful complex, a supercomputer, biogenetic technologies, neurocognitive research, and so on. This is all there, it works. The average age of hundreds of people working there is 35 years. A personnel training system has been created. The world's first faculty of NBIK-technologies was created at the Physicotechnical Institute on the basis of the Kurchatov Institute. That is, the personnel "pump" is on. And it all works.

Farther. Now, in the remaining time, I would like to talk about what is happening in the world with science and technology. Here is science and technology in the system of factors in the development of civilization. Look what is happening today, even if you look at it in the philistine.

First. We hear screams all the time, and this is happening, about the creation of an absolutely transparent scientific and educational sphere, this is the first, and unlimited mobility of human resources.

And now - what does it mean. Here you have funds (our funds, for example) that give money for scientific research, but after that everything is in the public domain. This means that all information on the results, performers, personnel reserve, created and prepared at the expense of the national budgets of various states, is in the public domain and can be easily monitored, and therefore, so to speak, managed. This makes it possible, first of all, and only today, for the United States to use the results of R&D or R&D and R&D at the expense of the resources of the outside world, to attract performers and recruit the most capable young personnel. In fact, today the Americans are creating a global distributed scientific and educational environment, which is funded by national budgets and serves the interests of the United States. This is the real thing.

Next, the next step. Now, if you look at us now, what is happening to us in the light of the fact that I am now only

what he said, the following happens: purposeful deprivation of the country of strategic goals and concentration on tactical tasks. Until today … we have no strategic national interest in scientific and technological development. We solve tactical problems, as during the war: we can make tanks, guns, win the war, but lose the future. Today we are concentrating - until recently, the last decisions of the President - on solving tactical problems.

The second is the clustering of the scientific sphere. It happened at the moment of survival, when everything was bad for us, there was no money. The great sphere, the great scientific sphere of the Soviet Union disintegrated into clusters, because you cannot leave the encirclement either by a division, or by a battalion, or even by a platoon - one by one. Therefore, it was clustered. And today this clustering with the help of the grant system is fixed and frozen so that … in this case it is easily managed.

I'll give you an example. For 15 years I was the director of one of the largest academic institutes - our Institute of Crystallography on Leninsky Prospekt. 250 researchers and 50 grants, very small, from the scientific fund - 500 thousand rubles each. The entire potential of the institute is divided into 50 groups. 50 groups of five people live excellently on these 500 thousand, having no responsibility, nothing else, they work, travel abroad, have graduate students, apply for the next grant and have a great life. And the results of this activity, which are obtained for our money, are very easy to use only with the help of observation, even electronic tracking, of the reports on these works. Everything. And this actually creates a system that is completely controlled, and you serve for your budget, for example, in Germany … I can explain to you in detail. American colony. They have no strategic goals, but they serve the global interests of America for their own budget.

I want to tell you another very important thing. The evaluation system, for example, scientometric, of scientific activity in the country, also actually leads, for example, to the destruction of national scientific periodicals and so on. These are very subtle things. In fact, we are witnessing an attempt to form a system in which scientific and technical global goals are clear only to the United States, and are formulated by them, and Russia must become a supplier of intellectual resources, an executor of tactical tasks necessary for the United States to achieve a strategic result.

This, fortunately, did not work out, but nevertheless we are still in the zone of this danger. This is all happening at the expense of the budget of the Russian Federation.

I will explain to you, I will give you a very important example of how Americans participate in international projects. Look: there are a huge number of international projects in Europe. The Americans are not part of any project financially, organizationally - not at CERN, not in an X-ray laser, anywhere, but their representatives sit on all governing committees, and not only they, but Poles and Slovaks with American passports. They, firstly, carry out full monitoring, and secondly, they try to stretch those solutions that are important to them, and so on. I can give you specific examples. This means that in fact they influence informally on decision-making, and then take full advantage of these results. I'll give you an example. A European neutron source was being created. We decided to do it many years ago, 10 years ago. Created teams of people. They have created a roadmap for what will be done. They look further. The Americans say: "Good material, but still needs to be finalized." A new group, lists of people, addresses, attendances, a new, second book, "White Book" are created. They look and say: "Here it is already decent, but it still needs to be improved a little, and people still need to be pulled up from here, from there." And after that, the Americans do not ask anyone, they allocate 1.5 billion from the budget.dollars to their national laboratory, take all this material and these people from Europe and build this accelerator. In Europe, these works have not yet begun (10 years have passed), and in America he has been working for four years. Here's the whole answer. In fact, everything is used for preparatory work for the money of European countries, but it is used in this way.

We, Russia, today participate in key roles, materially and intellectually, in major projects. We are contributing more than 2 billion dollars to European projects - ITER, CERN, which everyone knows, a free electron laser and a heavy ion accelerator. There is a billion dollars in Germany alone. And I must say that today we have returned to the creation of megaprojects on the territory of the Russian Federation, we have a PIK reactor. Sergei Evgenievich Naryshkin visited our site in Gatchina, saw this reactor, we were there the day before yesterday, on Monday. This is one of the most powerful, the most powerful reactor in the world, which, having passed the energy path, will go into operation and will be the world's largest installation. Then the Russian-Italian project "Ignitor" is being created, a new tokamak, the third - the accelerator in Dubna, the fourth - the synchrotron. This means that we have projects on our territory. But you have to be very careful, to understand that international cooperation, say, by the same Americans is also used to weaken Europe in fact, in the first place, and they are trying to drag us into this story to try their own positions.

I will skip the conclusions, they are not important, I think, here. You know, the conclusions are clear. I wanted to draw some futuristic pictures for you. I thought for a long time whether to say it or not. I think this is advisable. Just imagine, it may seem like such a sinister, strange future, but you have to understand that, unfortunately, this is reality. Let's take a rough look at the world, how the world works. The world was arranged very simply: a certain elite always tried to put the rest of the world at its service. First there was a slave system, then there was a feudal system, then there was capitalism in one form or another, in fact. But each time it ended with a change in formation. Why? Because the people whom the elite tried to turn into servants did not want this for two reasons. They, firstly, were biologically the same people as those who wanted to turn them into servants, and secondly, their self-awareness grew as they developed, and they themselves wanted to become an elite. And this whole cycle took place.

And now it turns out the following. Today, a real technological opportunity has arisen in the process of human evolution and the goal is to create a fundamentally new subspecies of homo sapiens "service" person. If you watched the film "Dead Season", you remember well, but then it was there some kind of reasoning, and today it becomes biologically possible to do it. The property of a population of "service" people is very simple - limited self-awareness, and cognitively it is regulated in an elementary way, we can see that this is already happening. The second thing is breeding management. And the third thing is cheap food, these are genetically modified foods. This, too, is all ready.

This means that today a real technological opportunity has arisen to develop a "service" subspecies of people, and no one can interfere with this anymore, this is the development of science, but this is actually happening. And you and I must understand what place in this civilization we can take.

I’ll read it to you, I’ll just read it, it’s not just that. May I come over?

Presiding Officer. Oh sure.

M. V. Kovalchuk.(Off microphone.) In 1948, the President of the World Health Organization … Heard? Not?

Presiding Officer. And we have it on the screens, all the senators.

M. V. Kovalchuk.(Speaks off the microphone.) Run your eyes, it says everything for sure. Back in 1948 …

Presiding Officer. Show this slide again.

And you have…

M. V. Kovalchuk. … announced what needs to be done.

Presiding Officer. Mikhail Valentinovich, there is also a slide opposite you.

M. V. Kovalchuk. Unfortunately, it is blurred, I cannot see it.

Presiding Officer. It's clear. We can see it very clearly.

M. V. Kovalchuk. I want to say that it says for sure that it is necessary step by step, firstly, to change self-consciousness, how to teach people that there is no need to reproduce and continue the race, and so on, to remove national peculiarities. This is what was said first by the president of the World Health Organization, Rockefeller's right hand, and then - in the 1974 US National Security Memorandum No. 200, which says that this must be done so that countries do not understand that this is happening.

Farther. So look what is happening today? Breaking down the system of basic moral principles in fact (this is the key issue) and creating alternative values that do not fit into real life.

Then a very important circumstance (the President spoke about this in his speech) - the absolutization of individual freedom. Pay attention, you are told from all sides (and some of our radio stations) that the child is more important than the parents. This happens at all levels - from family to state. Absolutization of individual freedom: a person is higher than a sovereign state, children are higher than their parents, and so on. And what does this lead to? This is actually a slogan to the destruction of the sovereign state, the sovereignty of the state, which is the only instrument for protecting society and values and maintaining a balance between human rights and freedoms. And we are witnessing this today. The absolutization of the slogan of individual freedom leads to the destruction of sovereign states.

And then - you have no protection, you have crowds of people who fight with each other and are easily controlled from the outside. And this is a powerful tool.

And another very important thing is in fact the replacement of this organized community of interacting and state-protected people with a set, simply a population of controlled separate individuals. This is what it is about.

And the next thing is the actual reduction in the birth rate by introducing into the mass consciousness of ideas that contradict natural ones. We are talking about LGBT people, families without children and everything else.

In fact, today we have this in the humanitarian sphere, but it is based on the technological basis of creating a "service" person.

That, in fact, is probably all that I wanted to tell you. (Applause.)

Presiding … Mikhail Valentinovich, I sincerely thank you for such a meaningful and interesting report. And the applause of my colleagues confirms that they listened to him with great interest. I think you have given us serious food for thought, including in our future lawmaking.

By the decision of the Federation Council, you have been awarded our commemorative medal "Federation Council. 20 Years". Allow me, on behalf of my colleagues, to present you with this medal. (The presiding judge presents the award. Applause.)

M. V. Kovalchuk. It was unexpected and pleasant. Thank you.