Former chess champion Garry Kasparov (designated as an extremist and terrorist, recognized as a foreign agent by the Ministry of Justice) has been implicated in a coup plot in South Sudan, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The grandmaster is alleged to have been involved in procuring weapons intended for a regime change in the African nation. The publication reports that Kasparov connected South Sudanese revolutionary Peter Adjak with Wall Street financier Robert Granieri, resulting in a $7 million allocation for the purchase of Kalashnikov rifles, grenades, and Stinger anti-aircraft missile systems.
When journalists sought comment from Kasparov, he denied any involvement in the attempted armed coup, stating that he has “spent most of his life defending civil rights and promoting democracy around the world.”
Adjak immigrated to the United States in the 1990s as one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan“—teenagers from the Nuer and Dinka ethnic groups who were orphaned during the civil war. He was educated at Harvard’s Kennedy School and returned to Sudan as a World Bank economist. Following South Sudan’s independence, Adjak became an opposition figure and was arrested after a failed coup attempt in 2013.
On April 24, 2024, in Komi, a court issued an arrest warrant in absentia for Garry Kasparov, former State Duma deputy Gennady Gudkov, co-founder of the Free Russia Forum (designated as an undesirable organization in the Russian Federation) Ivan Tyutrin, and former eco-activist Evgenia Chirikova. The defendants are accused of creating and leading a terrorist organization, financing terrorist activities, and publicly justifying terrorism.