Putin hasn’t come out of the blue, you know? It’s not just Putin. That’s why again in my book Winter is Coming, I emphasize why Vladimir Putin and en… - Garry Kasparov

You cannot look at the images from Ukraine in recent weeks and say there is no pure evil. Mariupol destroyed, Bucha slaughtered, Kramatorsk train station massacred. And worse is yet to come. And these horrors are not from Poland in 1945. Not from Rwanda in 1994. Not Aleppo 2016. This is Europe this week. How could this happen? How did we forget what evil can do? We have lost the generation that saw World War II firsthand. Otherwise we reserve absolute evil for fiction. In fables, they believe in true evil. Good is harder to define. There is no pure good. If anyone says they know what pure good is, it's probably evil. In fantasy tales of hobbits and elves and dwarves, there was an idea that good comes in different forms and shapes, often in conflict. But they had to be united when facing absolute evil. Good will disagree. Evil says, "No more disagreements ever." That was life in real Mordor, the Soviet Union. That's what Putin wants for Russia and the world. We celebrated the end of the Cold War, but for too long, we forgot that evil doesn’t die. It can be buried for a while under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, but it grows back through the cracks of our apathy.

Oh, what a great moment in world history. How we celebrated, the evil empire had fallen, the future looked bright. And yet, eight years later, on December 31, 1999, a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB became the president of Russia. His name was Vladimir Putin. How this happened is a long, painful story. And in fact, I wrote a book about it in 2015 called "Winter is Coming." Not an original title, I have to admit. ... But I'm a fan of "Game of Thrones." ... And also I felt it was appropriate because it was a warning. The subtitle was more important: "Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped." The publisher, by the way, didn't like it. "Enemies." It's too harsh. Sounded like Cold War. Well, here we are, 17 years later. And if I wrote a sequel, it would be called “Winter Is Here.” And the subtitle would be "I Bleeping Told You So."

As a chess player, I know that strategy is the future impact of present decisions. However grand our plans are for two, five, even ten moves ahead, it's the move that we make now that determines that future.