Turlov Congratulated
By Douglas C. · Mon, 28 Sep 2026
Dmitry Peskov congratulated Timur Turlov on winning the FIDE presidency this weekend.
Dmitry Peskov congratulated Timur Turlov on winning the FIDE presidency this weekend. That alone wouldn't be much of a story, plenty of officials issued similar messages, except that Peskov is Vladimir Putin's press secretary, and he did it in his other capacity: as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Russian Chess Federation, the same federation FIDE's General Assembly voted just hours earlier to keep suspended."As Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Russian Chess Federation, I would like to congratulate Mr. Turlov on his election to such a responsible position," Peskov told reporters, according to RIA Novosti. "FIDE is truly a unique federation, an international federation."A tidy piece of timingPeskov's remarks land in the same 48-hour window as two other stories Rook Review has covered from this congress: the Assembly's vote to uphold the Russian federation's suspension, rejecting reinstatement proposals from Armenia, Belarus, Cuba and Nicaragua on the grounds that FIDE has to comply with the Court of Arbitration for Sport's ruling, and the election of Pavel Kolobkov, Russia's former Minister of Sport, as one of FIDE's seven vice presidents, a result that prompted Malcolm Pein to quit his own Council seat in protest. Whatever Turlov's presidency ends up meaning for Russia's relationship with FIDE, the opening days of it feature a suspended federation, a former Russian government minister in the federation's second tier of leadership, and now Russia's own presidential spokesman speaking approvingly of the new administration in his chess capacity.Turlov's win also closes out a specific chapter of FIDE history. Between Kirsan Ilyumzhinov's presidency from 1995 to 2018 and Arkady Dvorkovich's from 2018 until this year, Russian nationals held the FIDE presidency for essentially all of the last three decades. Peskov, in his message, is congratulating the man who ended that run, while simultaneously representing the country whose grip on the office he's praising the end of.What it feeds, without proving anythingPeskov's dual role invites an obvious question, one this outlet has already reported carefully rather than settled: whether Turlov's rise owed anything to the reported Putin-Tokayev meeting in Omsk, where a since-surfaced claim alleged the two leaders agreed Turlov should become FIDE president and that Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, once he'd floated his own comeback bid, should be told to withdraw. That claim remains attributed to Agentstvo's reporting and has not been independently verified by Rook Review. Peskov's warm public statement, delivered from inside Russia's own chess governance structure, doesn't confirm that account. It also doesn't make it any easier to dismiss, particularly for federations already uneasy about how much Russian institutional interest appears wrapped up in a presidency that was supposed to represent a break from exactly that.