Kasparov is Putin’s opponent
Russia puts chess legend on terror list
March 6, 2024, 4:58 p.m
Garry Kasparov is one of the greatest chess players of all time – and a major critic of Russian President Putin. Now the athlete is threatened with massive trouble because he is listed as a terrorist in his home country, which he has not set foot in for over ten years.
Russia’s financial regulator has added former world chess champion Garry Kasparov to its list of “terrorists and extremists.” This is reported by the AFP news agency. Kasparov is an active political activist and is one of the harshest critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Kasparov, who was born in 1963 in Baku, the capital of the then Azerbaijani Soviet Republic, retired from chess in 2005 as world number one.
Since his withdrawal, he has dedicated himself with a lot of passion and against much resistance to working in the Russian opposition, first in Russia and later from exile. Among other things, he founded the “United Citizens’ Front” and became a member of the anti-government party association “The Other Russia”. Kasparov has been chairman of the International Council of the Human Rights Foundation since 2012 and lives with his family in New York. Since the death of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, the Putin regime has fallen into even greater disrepute because of its treatment of opposition figures.
“Thousands of young Russians are dying for this crazy dictator. Many of them were born under Putin and are dying under Putin,” Kasparov told the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”. Putin’s dictatorship is “by far the greatest existential threat to humanity,” he warned two years ago, a few days after the start of the war of aggression against Ukraine. He has not set foot in his homeland since 2013. Last year he emphasized during an awards ceremony: “We are having the most tragic moment in world history since the Second World War. The Russian attack does not only affect Ukraine. “It is a global fight.”
Chess was also “a small part” of Putin’s campaign “to undermine the free world,” stated Kasparov, who also explicitly mentioned FC Chelsea with owner Roman Abramowitsch and FC Schalke 04, which was sponsored by Gazprom for many years, in this context .