Weaknesses of character are normally shown in a game of chess.

Many Republicans who traditionally were for a positive role in the world, anti-Russian, now they want to defend their party and leader, and they don't care about real arguments. The paradox is the Democrats were so timid in criticising Vladimir Putin. Barack Obama appeased him and now they are criticising Putin's interference in American democracy. It is a strange reversal of the roles.

You cannot say, 'Go! Go! Rah! Rah! Good move!' People want some emotion. Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.

Putin can't afford to leave the office because he will be in real danger of being prosecuted for things he and his people did during their stay in power.

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?

If we keep an optimistic view about the future, we definitely have to look for our place. Not to be redundant. And that means we have to emphasize what makes us unique.

As for the eastern part of the former Soviet Union, the picture is rather uniform. Authoritarian structures prevail to differing extents. But we can still determine certain regularities, and the role of Russia is not to be underestimated. It is clear that we would have the same situation in Tajikistan and, let's say, Uzbekistan without the direct influence of Russia.