The Ukrainian chess prodigy setting up his board in Yorkshire
Britain’s chess community has rescued a possible future grandmaster from Odesa. By Malcolm Pein
In early May this year, a cherubic, wheat-haired boy wearing a Lviv Academy tracksuit top and a serious expression made moves across a chess board that caused shock and awe among spectators. Maksym Kryshtafor, an eight-year-old prodigy from Ukraine, had only been in Britain for four days. And here he was, winning his first UK chess tournament, at the Durham Congress in Darlington’s Victorian Civic Hall.
There are few things more frightening to English club players than an Eastern European wunderkind who can barely see over the pieces. Makysm scored five wins out of five, and took home first prize of £400 – more than the average monthly wage in his home town of Odesa.
Only four months earlier, Maksym and his mother Iryna had fled Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and were waiting in Romania for permission to enter the UK under the “Homes for Ukraine” scheme.
From the start, I was deeply involved in Maksym’s story. Soon after the Russian war started, I sent messages to contacts in the Ukrainian chess community saying that the English Chess Federation (ECF) wanted to help any way we could. We soon started to receive pleas from Ukrainian chess players for asylum. Simultaneously we made an appeal to ECF members to take in chess-playing refugees and there was a good response.
On April 8 one email caught my eye. It was from Maksym’s mother, Iryna, who, I was soon to discover, is a force of nature: a “Chess Mom” in the true sense of the phrase. The email explained the family had, with the help of the Ukrainian Chess Federation, escaped Odesa, which had already been shelled by Russian forces and were living hand to mouth in Romania.
Iryna wanted to find a safe haven where Maksym could develop his prodigious talent and she reeled off a long list of his achievements and victories. “We do not need any special conditions, but a peaceful sky and the opportunity to develop and advance in this sport,” she wrote.
I briefly considered hosting the family in London, but then I contacted Paul Townsend, an old friend and a strong amateur chess player, who lives with his wife in a sleepy North Yorkshire village. As the Townsends had built a spacious flat adjoining their house, I felt he’d be the perfect host for a prodigy.
“Iryna had to make her mind up very quickly,” says Townsend. “I was lucky, because I’ve worked as a solicitor for more than 30 years. If I wasn’t so familiar with the law, I don’t think I would have been able to cope with all the forms you have to fill in, it’s very lengthy and difficult. Making the application to bring Maksym and Iryna to this country was a full-time business.”
To his surprise, it only took about five days to process the visa applications. After the family received permission to come to the UK, I briefly caught up with Townsend at a UK national chess league fixture where he missed a game so he could buy a car seat for Maksym. That week he flew to Bucharest, where Maksym was playing in a tournament, and brought the pair back on the next flight.
They got through passport control at Luton Airport with no problem but, once in Yorkshire, there was a mass of paperwork to negotiate – registering for National Insurance and child benefit, finding doctors and dentists and so on. Iryna, a divorced former regional TV journalist in Odesa and a proficient English speaker, has taken on part-time work as a cleaner.
Maksym is adjusting to his new environment. “He is fascinated by double-decker buses, spotted on his first trip to York, which are unknown in Odesa,” says Townsend. “He was also astonished to find sheep with newborn lambs and alpacas in the field next door – growing up in a city apartment block he had never seen any kind of farm animal, even on TV.”
There have been some other adjustments. The village school has just 64 pupils and only one other boy at the school speaks Russian. Language remains a barrier to academic progress, but Maksym’s old class teacher from home conducts Russianlanguage lessons by Zoom from her own new safe haven in Kent.
But chess, of course, is languageless. And now Maksym is safe, thousands of miles away from Russian rockets, it means he can keep his dream alive.
Already the Ukrainian Under Eight Champion, Maksym’s aim is an ambitious one. He wants to emulate Sergey Karjakin, the Ukrainian-born (now Russian) World Championship challenger, who became the world’s youngest grandmaster at the age of 12 years, seven months. Each weekend since Darlington, Maksym, Iryna and Townsend have criss-crossed the UK looking for fresh chess challenges to help him rise up the ranks.
At the end of last month Maksym, wearing his lucky Lviv chess club fleece and carrying his cuddly toy cat, travelled to Thessaloniki to play in the European Under Eight championships and captured the Rapid and Blitz titles. Rapid and Blitz are the faster forms of chess, with 15 minutes and five minutes on the clock for the whole game respectively.
Last week, I met Iryna at the British Chess Championships in Torquay. She was still beaming, but her family are struggling. Maksym’s grandparents have now left Odesa, seeking refuge in a small village some way out of the city. The little boy talks to his grandparents by Skype and beams innocently when he mentions their cat.
For Maksym it’s not just learning the language that will be a challenge. In Ukraine, his education was heavily focused on chess. After attending regular school for four hours in the morning, he would go to a specialist chess school for a gruelling six hours a day. He has all his lessons by Skype these days. His coach is the Ukrainian grandmaster Nazar Firman, and they study well into the evening.
Chess has long been embedded in the culture of the former Soviet Union, but it is not recognised as a sport by the UK Government and receives no funding. The ECF has established a small fund to help Maksym and other Ukrainians pay entry fees and travel expenses but to attend the next challenge – November’s World Under Eight championship in Turkey – will cost thousands of pounds.
Our challenge now is to raise enough money, so this young man can proudly plan his future.