Moscow:
The re-election of a former Russian deputy prime minister as head of the International Chess Federation was a “victory” for Moscow, the Kremlin said on Sunday.
Arkady Dvorkovich’s re-election as FIDE president was “clearly very good news and a very important victory,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told TASS news agency.
“It’s very cool. This is an important organization, where there is a lot of work to be done, and we hope that Dvorkovich will be successful in this,” said Peskov.
In the race for the top job at FIDE, 50-year-old Dvorkovich, who served as Deputy Prime Minister under President Vladimir Putin from 2012 to 2018, had to take out Ukrainian challenger Grandmaster Andrii Baryshpolets, who accused him of being part of Moscow’s “war machine”.
But a landslide majority of 157 of the 179 national chess federations voted for his re-election at a rally in India.
Baryshpolets, who challenged Dvorkovich with Denmark’s running mate Peter Heine Nielsen – coach of Norwegian world champion Magnus Carlsen – won just 16 votes. There were five abstentions and one invalid vote.
Numerous Russian officials have been hit by sanctions since Moscow sent troops to Ukraine in February, and Russian participants have been banned by numerous international sports governing bodies.
Dvorkovich, 50, who was first elected FIDE president in 2018, appeared to criticize Russia’s offensive in Ukraine in March when he said his “thoughts are[turning]to Ukrainian citizens”.
But after the reaction the comments provoked in Russia, he backed down, saying there was “no room for Nazism or the domination of others by some countries”.
Historically, Russia has exerted a huge influence in the chess world since Soviet times, when the game was one of several confrontations between the communist bloc and the West.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)