I'm not paranoid, but I am cautious. I don't drink tea with strangers, I don't fly Aeroflot and I avoid certain countries with close ties to Russia.

Learning from our mistakes is critical for improving, but even I don't have patience for ranking my regrets. Regret is a negative emotion that inhibits the optimism required to take on new challenges. You risk living in an alternative universe, where if only you had done this or that differently, things would be better. That's a poor substitute for making your actual life better, or improving the lives of others. Regret briefly, analyze and understand, and then move on, improving the only life you have.

In my opinion, using different kinds of epithets and adjectives in connection with the word democracy is a sign of mere hypocrisy, to put it mildly. Either there's democracy, or there isn't.

I’ve seen - both in myself and my competitors - how satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, then to mistakes and missed opportunities.

Dictatorships can exist with free markets - not that China is really a free market - especially in poor countries where the regime insists that it's a choice between food and liberty, a false choice. But increasing affluence will inevitably result in political pressure.

Furthermore, the situation in the North Caucasus is rather unstable. Mutual relations and the cooperation between [Vladimir] Putin and [Ramzan] Kadyrov, the high price that has been paid to buy the loyalty of the local elite through an enormous tribute of multibillion[-ruble] investments, all this cannot be an arrangement for good.

I don't think that nature envisaged an insurmountable mechanism that would hinder any country from taking the path of democratic development.