Kasparov in the firing line. How Moscow ‘outsources’ its murders

In 1985, a twenty-two-year-old man born in Baku defeated Anatoly Karpov to become the youngest world chess champion. Karpov played the way Moscow was run: positionally, patiently, without ever taking too many risks. Garry Kasparov attacked, sacrificed pieces, disrupted the game, and took little comfort in the rules of the Soviet Chess Federation: he seemed to embody Gorbachev’s USSR, the one that was trying to change. He remained at the top of the world rankings until 2000. In 2005, he retired from competitive chess to take on a longer and less regulated contest: the one against Putin, which he has been playing for over ten years whilst in exile in New York. In 2015, he published a book on Putin with a title that gave a nod to George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, at the height of the series’ success, and which at the time seemed to many to be an exaggeration: ‘Winter is coming’. In 2024, Moscow placed him on its list of terrorists and extremists. Now winter has come for him.

Kasparov wrote on Wednesday that he had been warned by the American and Lithuanian intelligence services that his life was in immediate danger. Ivan Tyutrin, his most loyal supporter, is reportedly on the same list of people to be eliminated. The news, says Kasparov, “comes as no surprise to me, but it is still a shock”. Together with Tyutrin, in 2016, he founded the Free Russia Forum, which today organises conferences opposing the war in Ukraine. According to US and Baltic intelligence, Moscow had been planning the assassination of Kasparov and Ilya Ponomarev – the only Duma deputy who voted against the annexation of Crimea in 2014 – for months.

Last month, U.S. authorities charged five individuals with conspiring with Russian intelligence. The aim was to kill two opponents, one in the United States and one in Lithuania, after paying people recruited to monitor them. Kasparov notes that neither he nor Tyutrin were explicitly informed that they were the targets.

But it is the composition of the network of assassins that speaks volumes. At its helm were a former colonel in the Russian secret services and his son. The others were two Cubans and a Venezuelan. The group had been active for at least two years, and this summer it allegedly attempted to assassinate a prominent Russian dissident in the United States.

This is where the change of pace becomes evident. In Salisbury, in 2018, Moscow had sent two GRU officers with false passports to poison Sergei Skripal. For some years now, however, the Kremlin has preferred to ‘outsource’ its assassinations. In Vilnius, in 2024, it was Polish citizens paid by the Russian security services who attacked Leonid Volkov with a hammer. In Europe, arson and sabotage are entrusted to young people recruited via social media for a few hundred euros. This time, the foot soldiers come from Latin America, from countries that Moscow cultivates as allies, and the target is a murder in the United States. They are pawns: they are sent in, they sacrifice themselves without regret, and if they fall, it is not immediately possible to trace the hand that set them in motion.

The Kremlin’s other target was in Lithuania. Vilnius is the capital of Russian exile, the most exposed square on the chessboard, where the pieces from both sides almost touch. Tyutrin told AFP that, following the American announcement, the Lithuanian authorities told him to leave his home immediately and get rid of his car. It is the same country where, on 15 September, Italian fighter jets shot down a Russian drone. The same Baltic region where, this week, Moscow threatened to unleash its entire arsenal if NATO were to attempt to isolate Kaliningrad.

Kasparov says he has taken his precautions and will continue to watch his back. In chess, when you concede defeat, you tip your king over and shake hands with your opponent. Kasparov has spent twenty years explaining that it doesn’t work like that with Putin. This game cannot end with a handshake.