Chess champ brands Putin an ‘oligarch’

TALLINN, Estonia — Chess legend Garry Kasparov on Sunday branded Russian President Vladimir Putin “an oligarch who wants to rule like Stalin” and urged the west not to think of him as a democratic leader.

“My plea to the western world is, please stop calling Putin a democratic leader. Putin is an oligarch who wants to rule the country like Stalin but to live like a modern oligarch,” he told the Lennart Meri conference in Tallinn.

The west should also “admit that the regime of Putin is the regime of oligarchs whose common slogan can be summarized as ‘lets steal together’,” charged the Sovietera chess world champion turned opposition figure.

“When in the U.S. the president has to humbly ask Congress for every dollar he wants to spend, in Russia Putin can move billions by his own choice without asking anyone else,” Kasparov said.

He said he believed that any “ousting of the current president will most likely come from the circles of his own closest allies.”

Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who was also at the conference Sunday, claimed that recent polls that led to the re-election of Putin as president were marred by fraud.

“There are three symbols of current Russia — brutal police who last week once again arrested both me and some 1,200 demonstrators, of whom some are still jailed; terrible cynical propaganda; and total falsifications during elections,” said Nemtsov.

Not only were result falsified, but the state also refused to register many democratic candidates, he complained.