US warns exiled Kasparov of Kremlin assassination plot targeting dissidents

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion turned Russian opposition leader, has been living under an assumption that has now hardened into official warning: the Kremlin wants him dead. In recent months, security officials from the United States and Lithuania approached him with intelligence suggesting his life was in danger. He is not alone. Another dissident, Ivan Tyutrin, his co-founder at the Free Russia Forum, received similar alerts. Neither man was told explicitly that he appeared on a kill list, but the message was clear enough that both took precautions.

Kasparov disclosed this in his publication The Next Move, writing with the careful precision of someone accustomed to speaking for the record. "I will not stop and I will not hide, even if I thought it was possible to do so," he wrote. "My family and I will not truly be safe as long as Putin is in power in Russia—a circumstance shared by millions." The Spanish newspaper El Mundo, citing sources close to Kasparov, reported that he had been placed under enhanced protection over the summer, the first time since his arrival in the United States that such measures were deemed necessary.

The warnings arrived against a backdrop of formal American action. In early October, the US Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging five individuals with operating as part of what prosecutors called a global assassination network. The five—Yuri Khrameev, Kirill Khrameev, Oemis Romagoza Durruthy, Yaidel Delgado Suarez, and Angel Eduardo Castro—allegedly worked for Russian intelligence services and had been conspiring to conduct attacks and murders targeting Russian dissidents and defectors across multiple countries, including the United States. All five remain at large. Assistant Attorney General John A Eisenberg described the operation as one that "reached into the United States, attempting to recruit US citizens and foreigners to carry out killings at the behest of the Kremlin." The network had been operating since at least 2024, according to the Justice Department.

Kasparov's own path to exile is long. He retired from competitive chess in 2005 to enter politics, founding opposition movements that directly challenged Putin's rule. In 2013, he left Russia and has not returned. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin designated him a foreign agent. Two years later, in 2024, he was added to Russia's official list of terrorists and extremists—a classification he rejects. The other reported target, Ilya Ponomarev, carries his own history of defiance: he was the sole member of the Russian parliament who voted against the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He subsequently fled to Ukraine. When asked by the Moscow Times whether he had been warned of the alleged plot, Ponomarev declined to confirm or deny the claim but called the allegations "a new level of escalation" by Russia.

When the indictment became public, the Kremlin's response was characteristically dismissive. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he would not comment on the charges until presented with "credible evidence" or "tangible facts." The statement carried the familiar weight of denial, though it did not address the substance of what American prosecutors had assembled. For Kasparov, the indictment and the warnings that preceded it represent something more than legal proceedings in a distant capital. They are confirmation of a threat he has lived with for years—one that extends now not just to him but to his family, and one that he believes will persist as long as Putin remains in power.