LONDON: Russia‘s financial monitoring agency, Rosfinmonitoring, has added former world chess champion and political activist Garry Kasparov, a prominent critic of Kremlin, to its list of “terrorists and extremists“, RIA state news agency reported Wednesday. The listing puts limits on individuals’ bank transactions and forces them to seek approval every time they want to use their accounts.
Kasparov, 60, fled Russia in 2014 for fear of persecution. He currently lives in the US. He has been a longtime opponent of President Putin and has repeatedly spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In Feb last year, he urged the West to keep up its support for Kyiv and said Ukraine had to defeat Moscow as a “pre-condition” for a democratic transition in Russia.
Kasparov joked about the label on X. “An honour that says more about Putin’s fascist regime than about me,” he wrote. Russian justice ministry added Kasparov and former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky to its list of “foreign agents” in 2022, subjecting them to burdensome bureaucracy including financial reporting.