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Garry Kasparov disclosed in a Substack post that security services in the United States and Lithuania informed him and Ivan Tyutrin their lives were at risk, leading both to implement precautionary measures even though neither was explicitly named in a related US indictment. The 63-year-old New York resident described the development as shocking despite aligning with long-held expectations, according to accounts in Reuters and BBC reporting published the same day. Kasparov pledged to maintain his criticism of the Russian government, a stance he has upheld since entering politics two decades ago. He emphasized that neither he nor Tyutrin received confirmation they were the concealed targets in the American charges.
The warnings arrived weeks after the US Department of Justice charged five individuals with ties to Russian intelligence over alleged plots to assassinate opposition figures in the United States and Lithuania. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York detailed a network that had operated since at least 2024, recruiting operatives for surveillance and targeted killings while using coded language such as measuring land for construction to signal assassination plans. One scheme offered $40,000 to a US-based recruit to kill a prominent Russian dissident believed to reside in the Washington area, the indictment showed. One defendant serves as an officer with Russia’s FSB security service.
Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported that Kasparov and former lawmaker Ilya Ponomaryov had received summer warnings from US authorities, with the former placed under enhanced protection for the first time since relocating to the United States. Tyutrin, who co-founded the Free Russia Forum with Kasparov and lives in Vilnius, told AFP that Lithuanian officials had urged him two weeks earlier to abandon his home immediately and dispose of his car. A Reuters dispatch from October 1 noted that unconfirmed media accounts have identified Kasparov, Ponomaryov and Tyutrin as the likely individuals under threat in connection with the charges.
Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005 to build political movements opposing President Vladimir Putin, eventually fleeing Russia in 2013 as pressures intensified, according to a BBC profile. Russian authorities labeled him a foreign agent in 2022 and added his name to the list of terrorists and extremists in 2024, measures that imposed banking restrictions and formalized his adversarial status, Reuters records from those years show. Those steps built on earlier designations that restricted his operations from exile while he continued advocacy through the Human Rights Foundation, which he chairs.
In the Substack entry, Kasparov stated, “News that I, along with my longtime associate and co-founder of the Free Russia Forum, Ivan Tyutrin, are on a list of assassination targets did not come as a surprise to me, but it is nevertheless a shock.” He added, “Lithuanian and US security services informed us that our lives were in danger and that we should take precautionary measures. I did exactly that, and I will continue to do so in the future.” The post concluded with his resolve that “I will not stop and I will not hide, even if I thought it was possible to do so” and that true safety for his family would arrive only once Putin no longer holds power in Russia.
The case continues a documented sequence of alleged Russian operations against exiled opponents, including the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in Britain and the 2018 nerve-agent attack on Sergei Skripal, both attributed to Moscow by UK investigators. A September 2026 Guardian analysis of the latest charges observed that the US indictment appears to signal a shift with plots now extending to American soil, referencing past incidents that included the death of a British woman from contaminated evidence in the Skripal case. An assessment published by the Center for European Policy Analysis around the same time highlighted the FSB’s intensified focus on Russian exiles abroad, framing opposition groups as controlled by foreign intelligence and labeling them in terms evoking historical betrayal.
