Garry Kasparov, threatened with death by Putin’s circle, ties his security to Ukraine’s victory
US security services reveal a plan by agents linked to Russian intelligence to kill the former world chess champion, who is living in New York
Garry Kasparov, 63, is the only one still alive of three very prominent opponents of Vladimir Putin who were threatened in 2012; the other two were Boris Nemtsov, murdered near the Kremlin in 2015, and Alexei Navalny, who survived a poisoning attack in 2020 and who died suddenly in a Siberian prison in 2024. The U.S. Department of Justice has now revealed a plan by agents linked to Russian intelligence to kill the chess player and activist—who is highly critical of Putin on a daily basis—last summer in New York, where he lives. The former world champion, who holds a Croatian passport, ties his fate to that of Ukraine.
The news “naming me and my long-time associate and Free Russia Forum co-founder Ivan Tyutrin as assassination targets cannot be called a surprise—but it’s still a shock,” Kasparov acknowledges in an article published Wednesday evening in his newsletter The Next Move. He wrote it from Strasbourg, France, where he flew to “bring pressure on” the European Court of Human Rights on the war in Ukraine. “It is vital to create legal mechanisms to release frozen Russian funds, especially in Belgium,” he adds. He also reveals that Lithuanian and U.S. intelligence services warned Ilya Ponomarev (a Russian-Ukrainian politician now in exile) and him, respectively, this summer that their lives were in serious danger. And indeed the surprise is relative: Kasparov’s name has, for years, been on Putin’s lists of “foreign agents” and “terrorist extremists.”
A co-founder in 2016 of the pressure group Free Russia Forum, Kasparov makes no secret of how he will respond to the threats: “I will not stop and I will not hide, even if I thought it was possible to do so. I believe that the best defense is a good offense.” He adds: “My family and I will not truly be safe as long as Putin is in power in Russia—a circumstance shared by millions. And so I will continue to do everything I can to rally the free world against Putin’s murderous dictatorship, especially by supporting Ukraine militarily and economically—and punishing Russia in similar fashion.”
Considered by many to be the greatest chess player in history (he was world number one for 20 consecutive years), Kasparov retired from top-level competition on March 10, 2005, after winning the Linares tournament in Spain, chess’s equivalent of Wimbledon, for the ninth time. That same day he announced that Putin had become a priority in his life: “All decent people must fight to overthrow that dictator.” He never concealed his political sympathies from a very young age: at first he liked the idea of being an ambassador of perestroika, the reforming spirit of Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom he broke abruptly after blaming him (for not having sent preventive troops) for the 1990 street massacres of Armenians in Baku (Azerbaijan), where he was born in 1963 to an Armenian mother and a Jewish father.
When this newspaper interviewed him in Moscow less than a year later, in January 2006, he was already living with bodyguards after being attacked twice on the street, and traveled in an armored car. He was detained in 2007 for three days; his fierce rival Anatoly Karpov brought chess magazines to the police station where he was held. By around 2012, Kasparov had highly reliable information that the most radical factions close to Putin were planning to assassinate one of the three most famous opposition figures. That prompted him to make one of the hardest decisions of his life: emigrate to New York, leaving his mother, Clara Shagenovna, in Moscow; she raised her only son to pursue only grand ambitions. In 2014, when EL PAÍS accompanied him on a tour in a private plane, calling his mother was the first thing Kasparov did after every landing.
“Ukraine’s victory remains, for me, the best guarantee of security,” Kasparov wrote on X on Wednesday night in a post linking to the article mentioned above, which also reads: “I decided long ago that I was going to do what I knew was right.” That sentence connects well with another unforgettable remark his mother told EL PAÍS in December 1985, a month and a half after Kasparov became the youngest world champion in history at 22: “Living for the pleasure of living is something neither my son nor I understand.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition