Vladimir Putin has this animalistic instinct of all dictators: He smells weakness. To quote Winston Churchill's definition of appeasement: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

I now have Croatian citizenship, but I only accepted it because Croatia allowed me to keep my Russian passport.

I’ve seen - both in myself and my competitors - how satisfaction can lead to a lack of vigilance, then to mistakes and missed opportunities.

The only successor to President Putin is President Putin himself and we could of course dream about President Putin stepping down voluntarily and picking out successor which would be probably as bad as him.

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.

There are fixed rules in chess, and no one knows how the game will end.

The highest Art of the Chess player lies in not allowing your Opponent to show you what he can do.