Timur Turlov Elected FIDE President, Ending a 30-Year Russian Run

Chess has a new president, and the vote wasn’t close in the end even though it took two rounds to get there. Timur Turlov was elected the eighth President of FIDE on September 26 at the FIDE General Assembly in Samarkand, held alongside the 46th Chess Olympiad.

The first round settled nothing. With three candidates on the ballot, Turlov took 96 votes to Wadim Rosenstein’s 76 and Jan Henric Buettner’s 20, one vote short of the 97 needed for an outright majority out of 192 valid ballots.

A runoff followed two hours later. Buettner and his running mate, Malcolm Pein, threw their support behind Turlov, and the second round broke decisively his way: 110 votes to Rosenstein’s 85, with Rosenstein simply saying “the results have been acknowledged.”

Turlov, 38, is the CEO of Freedom Holding Corp., a Nasdaq-listed financial and tech group with a market capitalization of nearly $11 billion. He has served as President of the Kazakhstan Chess Federation since January 2023 and founded the International School Chess Federation in 2024.

According to Chess.com’s reporting, Turlov was born in Moscow and held Russian citizenship until September 2022, when he said he renounced it, along with a St. Kitts and Nevis citizenship, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He has lived in Kazakhstan since 2011.

That biography matters for what the result represents. Chess.com reported that Turlov is the first non-Russian citizen elected FIDE president in more than 30 years, ending a run of Russian leadership stretching back to 1995, when Kirsan Ilyumzhinov first took the post.

Outgoing president Arkady Dvorkovich, who led FIDE for two terms from 2018 to 2026, had voluntarily suspended his own powers after being added to the European Union’s sanctions list in July, per Chess.com, but still campaigned for Turlov in Samarkand. He congratulated the winner afterward: “We are all one family, and we all share the same goal — for chess to be bigger, better and stronger in the world.”

Turlov struck a similar note in his own remarks. “We are all one family, and we will continue working as one,” he said, adding a specific pledge to the federation’s smaller members: “Every member federation, every person… will be treated equally well.”

The news reached players mid-round. Principal arbiter Ivan Syrovy paused Round 10 of the Olympiad to announce the result before play resumed, a detail that captured how tightly this election was folded into the same two weeks as the Olympiad itself — the same event where, a day earlier, FIDE handed out its first-ever Excellence Awards with Dvorkovich still presiding.

Buettner, for his part, framed the whole contest without bitterness once it was over: “An election has winners and losers. So does a game of chess. But FIDE — and chess itself — does not have to.”