Tournaments have been relocated. A top player has been suspended for supporting the war. For those who play chess at the highest level, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has swiftly taken things out of book.
Ottawa's Svitlana Demchenko plays chess in Mykolayiv, Ukraine in the summer of 2021. The Ukrainian-born Demchenko, one of Canada's top players, says the Russian invasion will have serious ramifications on the chess world, even if they're secondary to the human toll.
Nonetheless, the war, now more than a month old, is reverberating far beyond Ukraine's borders — and the world of chess is no exception. The invasion prompted the CFC to both condemn Russia's "evil and illegal" actions and applaud the courage of the Ukrainian people. The federation also declared that, for now, no Canadians would compete in official events on Russian soil.While dozens of top Russian players have decried Putin's actions, some have stayed loyal — including Sergey Karjakin, one of the world's best.
In this 2018 photo, Russian President Vladimir Putin, second from right, shakes hands with then-deputy prime minister Arkady Dvorkovich, second from left, at the Kremlin. Dvorkovich now runs FIDE, the world chess governing body, and there have been calls for him to resign.The suspension of Karjakin, who was a win away from becoming world champion in 2016, isn't the only big development.
"I think as a streamer, there should be a social implication that … you should be doing something to help," said University of Toronto student Qiyu Zhou, who holds the woman grandmaster title and streams chess and other e-sports to thousands of followers on her own Twitch channel.
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