Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Vostok National Guard staff in the Lugansk People's Republic (LPR), the Kremlin said in a statement.
"Vladimir Putin visited the Vostok National Guard staff in the Lugansk People's Republic, where he received reports from Col Gen Alexander Lapin and other senior officers on the situation in that area," the statement said.
Putin's visits to the staff of the Dnepr grouping of troops in the Kherson Region and to the Vostok National Guard staff in the Lugansk People's Republic were quite impromptu, the Kremlin press service said.
This was Vladimir Putin's first visit to the LPR and the Kherson Region, which joined Russia after 2022 referendums.
Earlier in the day, Vladimir Putin visited the staff of the Dnepr grouping of troops in the Kherson Region.
"Vladimir Putin, at the staff of the Dnepr grouping of troops in the Kherson Region, listened to reports from the commander of the Airborne Troops, Col Gen Mikhail Teplinsky, the commander of the Dnepr grouping of troops, Col Gen Oleg Makarevich and other military leadership," the Kremlin press service said.
"The head of state wished officers a Happy Easter and presented them with a copy of an icon that had belonged, Putin said, to 'one of the most successful defense ministers of the Russian Empire'," according to the President's press service.
In March, Putin paid a surprise visit to Mariupol, inspecting the city infrastructure and talking to local residents. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin accompanied the president during the visit and reported on the progress of construction and restoration work in the city and its environs, discussing new residential micro-districts, social, educational and health facilities
In mid-December 2022, Vladimir Putin visited the joint headquarters of the forces involved in the special military operation.
On 30 September 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the heads of the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, signed agreements on the accession of these territories to Russia, after referendums were held that showed that an overwhelming majority of the local population supported becoming part of Russia.
Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022 in response to calls by the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics for protection from Ukrainian troops. The Russian Defense Ministry said the operation, which targets Ukrainian military infrastructure, aims to "demilitarize and de-Nazify" Ukraine, and to liberate Donbass.
The artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT, the homework-drafting chatbot that some schools have banned, is coming to more students via the company Chegg Inc.
The US educational software maker has combined its corpus of quiz answers with the chatbot's AI model known as GPT-4 to create CheggMate, a study aide tailored to students, CEO Dan Rosensweig told Reuters last week.
"It's a tutor in your pocket," he said ahead of its announcement of CheggMate on Monday.
The software will adapt to students by processing data on what classes they are taking and exam questions they have missed, personalizing practice tests and guiding study in a way generalist programs like ChatGPT cannot, Rosensweig said.
It will be available next month for free initially, Chegg said.
The release is poised to widen what pupils do with AI just as educators are grappling with its consequences. Last year's launch of ChatGPT led students to turn in assignments written coherently by the chatbot, letting some sidestep coursework and forcing faculty to vet their integrity.
FILE - The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, on March 21, 2023, in Boston.
The Los Angeles Unified School District has blocked access to ChatGPT on its devices and networks pending more analysis, it told Reuters, while institutions such as France's Sciences Po banned it out of concern it plagiarized sources. Still other teachers have encouraged ChatGPT's usage if disclosed, for purposes such as critique.
Rosensweig said Chegg focuses on math and the sciences, not the essay drafting that has challenged schools. It also lets teachers restrict review of answers to questions on current exams.
Accuracy remains a problem for AI models, which predict what to say next without a grasp of facts. Rosensweig said Chegg has structured and checked its answers to ensure accuracy.
Asked if AI will prompt Chegg to shrink its pool of 150,000 experts contributing to its content, he said the company already balances humans with technology. CheggMate likely will decrease its cost of content and boost profitability over time, he said.
Analysts in recent months have questioned whether Chegg can grow its base of 8 million subscribers as students embrace the largely free ChatGPT software, created by the startup OpenAI. Chegg's stock has fallen 28% this year as of Friday, making its market capitalization about $2.3 billion.
OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said in a Monday press release that the startup eagerly partnered with Chegg to "improve the way people around the world learn."
Rosensweig said Chegg's proprietary data showed its relevance. "That's why they're working with us," he said.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Nasser Kanaani, a spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said the time had ended in which the United States was the global hegemon, calling the shots the world over.
“We are witnessing a change in the balance of power in the globe and there is no unipolar world anymore. The issue of the US being a superpower has been over,” Kanaani said at a news conference.
He noted that despite Western attempts to isolate Iran and turn it into a global pariah, the southwest Asian state has always been “influential.” He added that going forward, “Iran won’t limit its foreign relations to a specific region.”
Last year, Iran finalized its membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a Eurasian bloc for coordinating trade, security, and political cooperation between nine major countries, with more than a dozen other observer and partner nations. Together, the SCO members constitute over 40% of the world’s population and more than 30% of global gross domestic product (GDP).
More recently, Iran has patched up relations with its regional rival, Saudi Arabia, thanks to both nations growing friendship with China, another SCO member. The BRICS bloc of rapidly developing non-
Western nations has also weighed expanding its ranks, with China and Brazil recently voicing support for the effort; Iran is one of the contenders for membership.
All this has happened as US sanctions on Iran have continued to grow and Israeli threats of military action against the Islamic Republic have continued to mount.
The sanctions were reimposed in 2018 after a three-year hiatus created by the signing of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Washington claimed without evidence that Tehran had secretly violated the terms of the deal, which included abandoning any kind of nuclear weapons program and accepting strict limitations on the quality and quantity of uranium the country could refine and store.
While the Biden administration has claimed a desire to restore the agreement, two years of talks have so far failed to do so, and sanctions have remained.
While before 2015 those sanctions had been effective and destructive, after they were reimposed in 2018, many nations refused to abide by them except under threat of US action, and Iran had secured a lifeline via Russia and China that has only grown stronger as US sanctions have expanded to include both nations as well. However, in the shorter term, US sanctions did cause acute economic problems and made addressing the COVID-19 pandemic much more difficult.
The Pentagon has claimed in its recent strategy documents that Russia and China pose a threat to the “rules-based international order,” or the US-led global order that emerged after World War II, and identifies Iran and North Korea as nations cooperating with that effort. These claims have underpinned a marked shift in US strategic thinking toward what Washington calls “great power competition,” justifying an even more massive military buildup amid plans for war on multiple fronts.
While the US sanctions are ostensibly being used to try and isolate those nations and others from the global community, they are having the opposite effect, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, noted last November.
“The dimensions and nature of the new order are not exactly known, but its layout can be drawn,” he said. “The first basic line of the new order is ‘the isolation of the US’. Unlike in the past, when the Americans considered themselves the only dominant power in the world, the US does not have an important position in the new order and is isolated. It will have no choice but to stop interfering in various parts of the world.”
Changing Global Dynamics
Kanaani's comments reflect the shifting power dynamics in today's world, as the US no longer dominates global politics as it did in the past. The rise of countries like China, Russia, and India has led to a more multipolar world, where power is distributed among multiple nations, rather than concentrated in one superpower.
Implications for International Relations
The move away from a unipolar world has significant implications for international relations, as countries navigate a more complex global landscape. The shift has led to increased cooperation among nations in various regions, as well as the emergence of new regional powers. It has also prompted some countries to reevaluate their relationships with the United States and seek new alliances to protect their interests.
Highlighting the Iranian administration’s efforts to make the most of the new conditions to fulfill its national interests and strengthen regional convergence, the spokesman added, “Iran won’t limit its foreign relations to a specific region.”
Dismissing the notion that Tehran has connected its foreign policy to the 2015 nuclear deal, Kanaani explained that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is only one of the subjects in Iran’s foreign policy agenda.
The Iranian administration will not tie the economy and the livelihood of people to the fate of the JCPOA although it remains committed to the negotiating table, he added, stressing that Iran has great capacities for the promotion of foreign relations in various fields.
In remarks in November 2022, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei highlighted the signs of change in the world order and the emergence of a new world order. “The dimensions and nature of the new order are not exactly known, but its layout can be drawn. The first basic line of the new order is ‘the isolation of the US’. Unlike in the past, when the Americans considered themselves the only dominant power in the world, the US does not have an important position in the new order and is isolated. It will have no choice but to stop interfering in various parts of the world.”
Sudan's top army General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan [File: Ashraf Shazly/AFP]
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is the military commander leading the army against the RSF. But who is the man who has for years been the de facto leader of Sudan?
Darfur days
Although al-Burhan did not rise to prominence until 2019, he had an active role in the country’s military long before that, with a posting to Darfur in the early 2000s during the conflict there, in which he rose to become a regional commander by 2008.
While former President Omar al-Bashir and other top Sudanese officials have been charged with genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court for what happened in Darfur, al-Burhan has not. Neither has Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, head of the RSF, his former ally and current rival.
Over the years, al-Burhan distanced himself from the atrocities committed there, where the army, backed by the RSF, crushed a rebellion in a conflict that killed some 300,000 people and displaced another 2.7 million.
Uprisings, coups and a derailed civilian transition
By 2019, al-Burhan had travelled to Jordan and Egypt for further military training and had become chief of staff of the Sudanese army – a position to which he was promoted in February 2018.
When the uprising that toppled al-Bashir took place in April 2019, ending his nearly 30-year rule, al-Burhan was inspector general of the army and Sudan’s third-most senior general.
Amid popular protests against the Bashir-era defence minister leading the post-removal Transitional Military Council (TMC), al-Burhan was made the head of the TMC.
A few months later, international pressure led to the formation of the Sovereign Council (SC), a civilian-military partnership to steer the country towards elections this year, in place of the TMC.
As head of the SC, al-Burhan became the de facto head of state, working alongside the civilian pro-democracy forces in the country.
In 2021, however, al-Burhan and his second-in-command Hemedti led a coup, seizing power and derailing Sudan’s short-lived path to democracy.
As de facto head of state, al-Burhan has forged closer ties with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, states that had encouraged the general and Hemedi, the head of the RSF, to support the removal of al-Bashir.
The Gulf states in particular gave significant amounts of aid to Sudan as Sudanese troops were deployed in the Saudi-led coalition to fight against Iran-aligned Houthi rebels in Yemen
Al-Burhan also has close relations with Egypt, with the two armies staging joint military exercises and al-Burhan himself having trained with many Egyptian generals at its military college.
Relations between the army and the RSF have been deteriorating for a while as parties have jockeyed for power, and the latest crop of violence seems to be an articulation of that friction.
Under a framework reached last December between the army, the RSF and Sudan’s civilian pro-democracy forces, the army had agreed to return to its barracks and the RSF to be absorbed into its ranks, the two forces brought together under army leadership.
As the time drew nearer for the signature of a subsequent agreement to begin implementing these agreements, alliances seemed to be shifting and the public discourse became tenser.
The recent outbreak of violence has crushed many hopes for the restoration of civilian rule in Sudan.
The trend of cutting dependence on the US dollar and switching to national means of payment in international settlements is gaining steam across the globe.
US sanctions against Russia and other countries have put the dollar's dominance at risk, as targeted nations are seeking out alternatives, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told an American news outlet on Sunday.
“There is a risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar,” Yellen said.
So, which countries are poised to scrap the use of the US currency in trade transactions? Sputnik explores.
Russia
In a new sign of Russia’s push to ditch the dollar, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a statement last week that the trend of abandoning the dollar for settlements in international trade is “irreversible.”
Lavrov added that the process of a number of countries, including Russia, “running away” from the dollar is already in place and that it “will certainly accelerate” in the immediate future.
According to the minister, the US has shot itself in the foot, managing the world economy by means of the dominant role of the dollar. Lavrov added that Washington slapping sanctions on Moscow over its special military operation in Ukraine has indicated the need for other countries to cut their dependence on the West.
This echoed previous remarks by President Vladimir Putin about the “inevitable process of de-dollarization,” which he said is currently taking place in Russia and necessitates the restructuring of the national economy as soon as possible.
The Russian Finance Ministry, in turn, has repeatedly called the dollar “toxic,” while head of Russia’s VTB bank Andrey Kostin described the US currency as Washington’s most powerful weapon, allowing it to "dominate and scare other countries." Russia has no other choice but to "follow the path of de-dollarization,” according to him.
Brazil, China
In a separate development last week, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva urged BRICS nations to come up with an alternative to replace the dollar in foreign trade. The BRICS countries include Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
"Why can’t an institution like the BRICS bank have a currency to finance trade relations between Brazil and China, between Brazil and all the other BRICS countries? Who decided that the dollar was the (trade) currency after the end of gold parity?" Lula said during a visit to the Shanghai-based New Development Bank.
At the same time, he admitted that ditching the dollar is “difficult because we are unaccustomed [to the idea]. Everyone depends on just one currency."
Lula spoke after Brazil clinched a deal with China to trade in their own currencies, in a bid to abandon the US dollar as an intermediary. The Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency said that the agreement will help “reduce costs and promote even greater bilateral trade and facilitate investment."
Western media, in turn, reported at the time that the deal is expected “to enable China, the top rival to US economic hegemony, and Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, to conduct their massive trade and financial transactions directly, exchanging yuan for reais and vice versa instead of going through the dollar.”
A state-run Chinese media outlet has, meanwhile, said that the country’s largest commercial bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), has processed the first cross-border yuan settlement in Brazil at its local branch there, “marking another significant step in the yuan's globalization."
The transaction became the first of its kind since China's Central Bank authorized the ICBC as a yuan clearing bank in Brazil in February.
Chinese experts were cited by the outlet as saying that “yuan settlements are expected to boost the regional economic and trade recovery in the post-COVID era and help companies to find a more reliable alternative to the US dollar as they seek safer cross-border trade and investment deals.”
Zhang Jieyu, assistant research fellow at the Department for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, China Institute of International Studies, told the outlet that the yuan settlement with Brazil “sends a clear message of the growing acceptance and influence of the Chinese currency globally which will serve as an example for more countries to follow.”
The outlet reported that “while the US dollar still dominates Brazil's foreign exchange reserves, the yuan's role, as a rising international reserve currency, has been highlighted lately.”
A recent survey report by the Central Bank of Brazil showed that as of the end of 2022, the proportion of the yuan in Brazil's international exchange reserves had reached 5.37%, exceeding the proportion of the euro at 4.74%, which means that the yuan becomes the South American country's second-largest reserve currency.
India
While India is downbeat about trading in yuan due to the country’s tense relations with China, the very idea of diversifying foreign trade currencies is of great interest to New Delhi.
Media reports said last week that a whole array of countries was holding talks with India’s Central Bank to discuss the conclusion of mutual trade transactions in Indian rupees.
The countries reportedly include India’s immediate neighbors, such as the Maldives and Myanmar, as well as Russia, and even the UK, Germany, and New Zealand.
According to the reports, companies and banks of the above-mentioned countries now plan to create the so-called vostro accounts in Indian banks, which will help them clinch deals for the supply of Indian goods abroad, and vice versa.
At the moment, the system looks rather cumbersome, given that the opening of each such account should be approved by Indian regulators, and that accumulated account balances can only be invested in Indian government bonds. Experts say that even though the system is out of sync with free trade principles, it represents a major step forward. The scheme is thought to have already been tested in transactions related to Russian-Indian trade and that of India and Iran.
BRICS' Single Drive to Scrap Dollar
As for BRICS on the whole, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in February that the group’s member states are already actively working on increasing payments in national currencies in mutual trade and financial operations due to the unreliability of the dollar.
“The share of national currencies in settlements between the BRICS countries is already rapidly growing. The BRICS countries have initiatives that address the need to work on the creation of their own currency. The reason is very simple: we cannot rely on mechanisms which are in the hands of those who can cheat at any time and refuse to fulfill their obligations," Lavrov told reporters.
Russian economist and researcher Mikhail Khazin told Sputnik in this vein that the dollar's dominance might be brought to an end by the emergence of several alternative currency zones, comprising the Latin American, Eurasian, Chinese, and Indian regions.
Khazin argued that the process is already underway, and that "it now makes sense to create a payment system that combines the currency systems of the Eurasian, Chinese, Indian, and Latin American zones."
"It is necessary to create a payment system independent of the dollar," he pointed out.
Gulf Nations
In mid-March, the Chinese Export-Import Bank reportedly clinched the first cooperation and loan deal with the National Bank of Saudi Arabia. The goal is to ensure future settlements of transactions between companies from the two countries in national currencies.
According to experts, Riyadh began to mull switching to yuan trading as early as in March 2022, and its active cooperation with Beijing in this sector in recent months has added significantly to the process.
In a separate development late last month, China signed the first ever yuan-settled energy deal pertaining to some 65,000 tons of the UAE’s liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The transaction was carried out by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and France's TotalEnergies through the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange. Representatives of the Chinese oil and gas company CNOOC said in this regard that they intend to continue promoting "innovation" in LNG trade.
The deal came after Iraq's Central Bank announced in February that it planned to allow trade from China to be settled directly in yuan for the first time, in an effort to improve access to foreign currency.
The Central Bank said it looks to compensate for a dollar shortage in local markets, which had previously made the government approve a currency revaluation.
"It is the first time imports would be financed from China in yuan, as Iraqi imports from China have been financed in [US] dollars only," Mudhir Salih, the government's economic adviser, told a UK news agency.
The remarks followed Russian expert Mikhail Khazin telling Sputnik that the “inevitable” process of de-dollarization has been facilitated by Washington's sweeping sanctions against major global players, including Russia, and the use of the dollar as a "punishing" mechanism. By freezing Russian Central Bank assets, severing the nation from the SWIFT payment system, and prohibiting exports of US dollar-denominated banknotes to the country, Washington sent an ominous signal to other world players, the Russian expert concluded.
Chinese smartphones made up more than 70% of the Russian market in the first quarter of 2023, consumer electronics retailer M.Video-Eldorado said, up from around 50% last year.
China's smartphone surge comes after Samsung and Apple both curtailed sales in Russia over the conflict in Ukraine, with Chinese manufacturers Xiaomi and Realme now occupying the market's top two spots.
Moscow is becoming more dependent on Beijing, having sharply raised its use of the yuan, increased energy supplies to China and started selling more Chinese-branded cars as Western automakers leave Russia.
Apple and Samsung have dropped to third and fourth spot respectively, from first and third in 2022, Russia's leading consumer electronics retailer M.Video said.
"Demand for brands from China in quantity terms increased by 42% relative to last year, and their total share was over 70%," M.Video added in a statement on Monday.
Russia is trying to wean itself off Western technology and the Kremlin told officials involved in preparations for the 2024 presidential election to stop using Apple iPhones because of concerns that the devices are vulnerable to Western intelligence agencies, Kommersant newspaper reported last month.
The Kremlin has also moved to allow Russian companies to ship in some products, including smartphones, without the license holder's permission in so-called parallel imports.
Analysts say that most devices are imported from China, but the Vedomosti newspaper in February cited research by GS Group, which said that parallel imports had helped iPhone imports from India double in 2022 compared with the year before.
Last year, M.Video and mobile operator MTS began selling discounted and used smartphones, offering Russian consumers cheaper alternatives as Western sanctions contributed to economic contraction and falling wages.
M.Video noted that demand for smartphones was recovering in the first quarter of this year.
