According to the occupiers “media,” at the end of October, the Crimean collaborator we’ve repeatedly described, the fake “World Chess Champion” and “Crimean senator” of the aggressor, Sergey Karjakin, was deployed by Russian intelligence services “in the Belarusian direction,” where, on the occasion of the so-called “National Unity Day,” the opening of “chess clubs at Russian houses in Minsk and Grodno” was announced.
The aggressor’s propaganda claims that these “clubs are aimed at children, but will be open to everyone” and makes no secret of the fact that Karjakin’s “chess diplomacy” has a purely political purpose: recruiting Belarusian youth to become fans of Russian aggression, including by sending them to “Crimean camps.”
Let’s recall that the occupiers previously attempted to promote “chess ideas of the Russian world” in the Crimea through the sanctioned pseudo-world champion Karjakin, whom FIDE banned from participating in international tournaments, but this looked extremely tragicomic.
However, Karjakin’s current photo shoots with Belarusian children clearly smack of “putting on a brave face in bad game”: the “Russian houses” themselves in Belarus, promoted by Russian punitive forces under the guise of “Rossotrudnichestvo,” are extremely odious and toxic even in the local “public sphere.”
The network of such “houses” covers, in addition to Minsk and Grodno, Gomel and Brest, yet the leadership of these institutions “for some reason” is never publicly mentioned, and they are reluctant to “show off,” including at Karjakin’s “simultaneous exhibitions.”
