On 2nd of July, FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov visited Lviv ( Ukraine ) and had a meeting with the President of Ukraine, Petr Poroshenko and the Mayor of Lviv, A.Sadoviy. It was announced that the Women’s World Championship Match between the Women World Champion Ukrainian, Maria Muzychuk and the Chinese challenger, Hou Yifan will be organized in Lviv. In an interview published on the Ukrainian website obozrevatel.com, the 13th World Champion, Garry Kasparov expresses his serious doubts about the goals of the meeting. The FIDE President gives his comments on this issue:
In one interview Garry Kasparov has succeeded to insult everybody – the President of Ukraine, Petr Poroshenko, the government of Lviv, including its Mayor Andrey Sadoviy, the President of the Ukrainian Chess Federation, Viktor Kapustin, the current Women’s World Champion, Maria Muzychuk, the President of FIDE and of course FIDE itself. Kasparov lost the FIDE elections in 2014 but still does his best to damage chess by mixing chess and politics and inventing fairy tales to support his political agenda. He has become professional in this attitude but this is Garry. He doesn’t care about chess, but only about himself and his political goals.
Garry is a great player and a better liar! He says that FIDE has huge financial problems and that normally FIDE pays to organize FIDE events. The information of our budget is opened to everybody and Garry knows very well that FIDE is in a good financial situation. Above this he knows that FIDE always tries to find sponsors and organizers for World Championship events and for years we have succeeded to organize all of them without spending any money from the FIDE budget. I should also say that for me the most important is who is the organizer, and for the Women’s World Championship Match, we have an excellent organizer.
I was very glad when the governments of Ukraine and Lviv invited me to attend a meeting to discuss the proposal to organize the Women’s World Championship Match in Ukraine . Only Kasparov, with his great ability to imagine things that do not exist, could consider my visit as a part of “the disruption of the Ukrainian state”. The interest in chess in Ukraine has been increasing ever since Anna Ushenina became the Women’s World Champion in 2012 and continues to increase even more so following the victory of Maria Muzychuk in Sochi in 2015. Garry Kasparov is jealous because he is not the one who is proposing to organize the Match in Lviv and Ukraine and he is trying to damage the event by insulting everybody involved.
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