Garry Kasparov has canceled his trip to Berlin due to security warnings about a possible Russian attack. The opponent of Vladimir Putin spoke by video on Monday at the Freedom Dinner at City Hall. "If it can reach me here, it can reach anyone. Your spouses and children, your colleagues," he warned. He reproached Europe for having become Putin's playground and recalled the former German chancellor's ties with Moscow.
The threats had already forced the former world chess champion to reinforce his protection in the United States. As EL MUNDO revealed on September 29, US authorities had warned Kasparov during the summer that he was the target of a plan to kill him. According to sources close to him, he received special protection for the first time since he left Russia and settled in New York in 2013. Now he attends interviews with bodyguards.
Kasparov has confirmed that both he and his collaborator Ivan Tyutrin, co-founder of the Free Russia Forum and exiled in Lithuania, had received warnings. "The security services of Lithuania and the United States warned us that our lives were in danger and that we should take precautions, which I did and will continue to do," he wrote in his newsletter. Wanted in his home country, from which he fled in 2013, and whose anti-Putin group, the Free Russia Forum, was listed as a "terrorist organization" in 2025 by Vladimir Putin's government. The need for protection abroad ruins one of the few advantages he had found in leaving Russia. After leaving professional chess in 2005 to dedicate himself to politics, he had eight bodyguards who also transported his food and water to prevent him from consuming food displayed in public. In 2012 he explained that one of the things he liked most about traveling abroad was being able to do without them for a while. A year later he went into exile.
"Of course, I'm not aware of Putin's conversations... But I would be surprised if [the assassination plot] could have progressed this far without a direct order from Putin," he told The Free Press last October. Yesterday he blamed European political leaders: "It is due to your policy, your security", and especially to the Germans: "Should I remind you that your former chancellor is a Russian lobbyist?", he commented in reference to Gerhard Schröder, head of the German government between 1998 and 2005, and who maintains a close friendship with Vladimir Putin and has held paid positions in Russian energy companies.
Kasparov also expressed confidence in one day returning to Berlin, a city that was already the scene of a murder judicially attributed to the Russian State: that of Zelimkhan Jangoshvili, shot in 2019 by Vadim Krasikov, the hitman who returned to Russia in the 2024 prisoner exchange. Other precedents are the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury in 2018 and the shooting death in Spain, in 2024, by Russian defected pilot Maxim Kuzminov.
Berlin Freedom Week runs until November 14 and brings together some 170 events dedicated to democracy, human rights and political persecution. This year Kasparov was among the announced participants of his conference, along with historian Anne Applebaum, former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López. What has consistently disappointed Kasparov is the reluctance of Western leaders—at least until the war in Ukraine—to take Putin's threat seriously, and he made this known to those present during his video address at Monday's dinner. "They must recognize the fact that they have allowed Europe to become Vladimir Putin's playground. If he can reach me here, he can reach anyone. Even their spouses and children, their colleagues," he said.
