Ukraine had quite serious impact on the many Russians. They could see that ordinary people in Ukraine which is a bordering state, very close to Russia, the people of this state are, they didn't want to tolerate anymore the power abuse by Ukrainian officials.

I think Russians today have a distorted picture of capitalism, liberal democracy and market economy.

I dropped the King's Indian in 1997 after one too many bad experiences against Kramnik.

Chess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive?

Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination.

The downfall of democratic institutions in Russia doesn't add to the self-confidence of either [Vladimir] Putin or his friends, as the loss of power could lead to repercussions in Russian society.

I'm not trying to give any definite answer. What I'm trying to prove is that we have enough gaps, enough discrepancies, enough simple falsifications to conclude that probably this history was an invention of a later time.