Tallinn – “Thirteen years ago I was still a national treasure,” Garry Kasparov said with bitter irony to Jill Dougherty. “Now I am officially charged as a terrorist. My status has changed.” Thus began the conversation at the Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn between the former world chess champion and current Russian dissident (in exile from the Putin regime for 13 years) and the journalist Jill Dougherty, former Moscow correspondent for CNN for over 30 years and now a lecturer at Georgetown.
Putin in a bunker? “That is astrology”
Dougherty’s first question challenged a widespread assumption: that Putin is struggling, hiding in a bunker, surrounded by a crumbling inner circle. Kasparov, a former chess player used to working with all information visible on the board, disagreed.
“In chess you have 100% of the information in front of you. But the real situation of a dictator is the most jealously guarded secret in any dictatorship. Talking about Putin in a bunker, about his health, about his inner circles, reminds me of old Kremlinology: watching who stood near Brezhnev on Lenin’s mausoleum and reading political meaning into it. It’s more astrology than analysis.”
What Kasparov was willing to state with certainty was different. Putin is not only at war with Ukraine. “Putin is at war with Europe, with all European institutions, with the free world. And I’m not the only one saying it: he has been communicating this consistently for more than two decades.”
Putin’s 2005 manifesto (that few took seriously)
The strongest part of the discussion dealt with Putin’s predictability. Kasparov traced a clear line that should have been visible: in 2005, during his second term, Putin told the Duma and the Federation Council that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.” Two years later, in 2007, he repeated the message in Munich, looking directly at George W. Bush and other Western leaders. The following year he attacked Georgia.
“Dictators always lie about what they’ve done. But very often they tell you precisely what they intend to do. Mein Kampf was published in 1925 as a political project; nobody took it seriously. In 2007 Putin set an ultimatum: roll NATO back to its 1997 borders. He raised it again in December 2021. Putin’s aim has been and remains to restore the Russian empire. There is no sign he has changed his mind.”
“When the war ends”
One of the most electric moments came when Dougherty, trying to look toward the future, said “when the war ends” three times in a row. Kasparov interrupted: “You said ‘war ends’ three times. You didn’t have the courage to say: when Ukraine wins.”
Dougherty defended herself: “Obviously, because no one knows exactly how you win or lose.” Kasparov reiterated his position: “Without a Ukrainian victory, nothing will change in Russia. Nothing. You have to prove that empires die. And nothing short of the Ukrainian flag flying over Sevastopol will prove that.”
The “imperial virus” and the mistake of 1991
Kasparov put forward a reading of Russian history that goes beyond Putin: it is not primarily a communist virus but an “imperial virus” that has recurred for centuries. “In 1991 we made a colossal mistake: we focused on the communist virus, but not on the imperial virus, which returned. Unless we convince the average Russian that the empire is dead, we will not see real change.”
He argued that a Ukrainian victory would not necessarily require unconditional surrender as in 1945, nor the capture of Moscow. “Think of 1918: Germany signed the armistice on November 11 while its troops were still in France and Belgium because it had exhausted its resources. Putin could be put in a similar situation.”
The Russian opposition abroad? “They write nice papers to get funding”
Dougherty raised an awkward question: what are exiled Russian opposition leaders actually doing? Kasparov did not spare his colleagues. “The people you often meet in Washington are dreamers drafting grand plans for rebuilding Russia after Putin. But none of that will matter unless Ukraine wins the war.” More bluntly: “They don’t have a plan. They write nice documents to secure funds and donations. Period.”
Kasparov also described the Russian delegation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, of which he is a member, as still too weak but the only institutional embryo of an alternative to Putin’s regime.
He paid genuine tribute to Boris Nemtsov, “the only politician who firmly opposed the imperial annexation” when Moscow took Crimea in 2014. Nemtsov was killed the following year by four shots in the back.
“Russians will embrace Western democracy with their stomachs, not their hearts”
On Dougherty’s philosophical question about pokayanie-the Russian concept of penance and atonement-Kasparov offered a harsh diagnosis. Russia never underwent a real judicial reckoning for communist crimes, and the brief period of self-awareness in the late 1980s was quickly buried under a nostalgic restoration. “Vladimir Putin was not an accident. We lost a very short window at the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s to break the imperial trajectory.”
His conclusion was direct: “You must force Russians to make a choice. The war is lost, the empire is dead. Do you want to rejoin Europe, paying reparations and acknowledging the regime’s crimes? Or do you prefer to become a satellite of China? Russians will not embrace Western democracy from the heart. They might do it from the stomach-because of hunger.”
The silent threat: China is waiting for Siberia
Kasparov raised a scenario few publicly name: the risk that, if the West does nothing, China will dismember the Russian empire. “China has enormous territorial claims on Russia: an area almost three times the size of France-1.5 million square kilometers. Much of the land from Vladivostok to Chita was Chinese until 1860. China is waiting. If we do nothing, the Russian Empire will collapse-but it may be China that causes that collapse. Perhaps in a few years there will be a referendum in eastern Siberia and we’ll discover it’s Chinese.”
Audience questions: Article 5 and a “Russia Taiwan”
The question session was equally revealing. A Russian journalist in exile, labeled a terrorist by the Kremlin for supporting the Ukrainian army, asked whether a European military alliance without the United States was imaginable. For Kasparov, “the security and independence of the Baltic states and Poland should not depend on the whim of one man in the Oval Office, who has shown during his life a tendency to be responsive to Kremlin requests. The very fact that we’re debating whether to activate Article 5 weakens it, if it doesn’t render it irrelevant. Putin is listening.”
‘How should the European Union treat a Russia that has lost the war?’ Kasparov proposed, partly in jest and partly seriously, a “Russia Taiwan”: create an alternative political entity to gather the millions of Russians who want to break with the Putin regime, provide them with documents and status, and train them as a political force. “We have millions of Russians who want out. They have nowhere to go. Their passports expire in ’26 and ’27. Europe issues over half a million visas a year-but not to them. Give them a chance.”
Finally, a scholar from the University of Florida asked about the paralysis of Western elites and the self-deterrence that in 2022 led the Biden administration to refuse to supply heavier weapons to Ukraine out of fear the Ukrainian army would collapse in weeks. Kasparov’s reply was an indictment: “Appeasement is a dirty word, but Chamberlain had good intentions; he was naive and not doing business with Hitler. We did something worse: we understood, we knew, and we still did not act. Ukraine has shown that the only way to make Putin predictable is to demonstrate strength.” (By Giorgio Rutelli)