BIG: Russia's state development bank VEB.RF fired its chief economist Andrei Klepach after his blunt assessment of the war went viral.

INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY

BIG: Russia's state development bank VEB.RF fired its chief economist Andrei Klepach after his blunt assessment of the war went viral. In his speech, Klepach warned: We will not win the competition in this war of attrition. We have the illusion that everything there will collapse. It has not collapsed, and it will not. He said Russia is falling behind "not only to China and the United States — in some respects, we are losing it to Ukraine," and predicted a social crisis "when no one partic