Kasparov says US and Lithuanian services warned him and Tyutrin their lives were in danger

Garry Kasparov said on Thursday that security services in the United States and Lithuania had warned him, and his associate Ivan Tyutrin, that their lives were in danger and that they should take precautions. He said he had done so. Tyutrin, speaking to AFP from Vilnius, said Lithuanian authorities told him two weeks ago to leave his home urgently and get rid of his car.

Kasparov, 63, lives in exile in the United States. He wrote that news of his name, and Tyutrin's, on a list of assassination targets did not surprise him and still came as a shock. He is a former world chess champion and a co-founder, with Tyutrin, of the Free Russia Forum. In the same post he was careful on one point: the services did not tell the two men they were confirmed targets. They told them their lives were in danger. That distinction is his, and it is the line between a named plot and a protective warning.

The September charges the warning sits on

In mid-September the US Department of Justice charged five people it described as agents of Russian intelligence with conspiring to carry out attacks and murders abroad, including inside the United States. One defendant is an officer of the FSB, the Russian security service. Prosecutors said recruits had been paid to watch two opposition figures, one in the United States and one in Lithuania. The charging documents, as described by Reuters and by coverage of the department's announcement, did not publish the names of the intended victims.

Unconfirmed reports have since attached those unnamed slots to Kasparov in New York, to Ilya Ponomaryov, a former Russian lawmaker now based in Ukraine who travels to the United States, and to Tyutrin in Lithuania. The Spanish paper El Mundo reported on Wednesday, citing people close to Kasparov, that Russian agents had plotted to kill him and Ponomaryov. Kasparov's own post does not confirm the El Mundo account. It confirms the warning, and the precaution.

What Tyutrin was told to do

Tyutrin is 45 and works from Vilnius. A two-week-old instruction to leave a home and dispose of a car is a specific protective step, not a general advisory. It implies the Lithuanian service thought the address and the vehicle were known to whoever it was warning him about. He told AFP he received that instruction. He did not, in the quotes carried on Thursday, say where he went.

Kasparov has been a public opponent of the Kremlin since he left electoral politics in Russia. A warning of this kind does not require a new speech from him to make sense. It requires a service judgment that surveillance already paid for, the conduct described in the September charges, had reached the point where a named person should move. The department has not said the five defendants' case is the source of the warning Kasparov received. The timing is what links them in public: charges in mid-September, a Lithuanian instruction about two weeks before 1 October, and Kasparov's statement on Thursday.

Moscow has not, in the coverage of Thursday's statement, answered the claim. The verified record is the warning as Kasparov and Tyutrin reported it, the September charging announcement, and the gap the two men themselves flagged: they were told to take care, and they were not told they were the names on the indictment.