Kovalenko Swaps Ukraine Front Lines For Chessboard In Poland

Thirty-six-year-old GM Igor Kovalenko played his first tournament outside of Ukraine in three years as he made nine draws in the recent 2025 Rubinstein Memorial in Polanica-Zdroj, Poland. The world number-54 is still a soldier but revealed he was able to leave the front lines after 2.5 years. Kovalenko says he’s been close to death a few times and, rather than feeling fear, he wondered, “had I lived my life well?”

It was understandable that Kovalenko was a little rusty. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, he'd only played a couple of classical games outside of Ukraine, in the Chess Bundesliga in November 2022. His first individual classical tournament in three years ended in a solid sixth place.

Among his nine draws, only once, against GM Radoslaw Wojtaszek, was he in serious danger, while against both GMs Mateusz Bartel and David Navara he missed endgame wins.

Kovalenko made more moves than anyone else in the tournament, but the final draw, in just nine moves, saw GM Nodirbek Yakubboev claim the title.

Kovalenko talked to Filip Zielinski for the sports site of the popular Polish news portal Onet. Though the Ukrainian number-two said he was glad to start to rebuild his chess career after 2.5 years as a soldier, he explained he’s still in the army, only operating further from the frontline so that he now has some more time for chess. He continued:

Until the war ends, however, there’s no chance that I’ll return to chess seriously. For now I’m trying to maintain my level so I can represent Ukraine at various tournaments.

Until the war ends... there's no chance that I'll return to chess seriously.

—Igor Kovalenko

He explained how he ended up in the army:

I was called up and I didn’t want to hide. Or rather, in the first days I was a volunteer, and then I was called up. I had no choice. I was called up at a moment when there still weren’t procedures so that as an Olympic sportsman you were drafted into the reserves. That’s why I went and then I tried to find a profession in the army that would best suit a chess player.

Had he considered fleeing Ukraine?

No, I’m not like that. On the day the war broke out I woke up and read all the messages from my friends, who were all writing “war, war, war” and went back to sleep. I thought I’d need a good sleep because the coming days would be tough. At the time I was north of Kyiv, in Hostomel, not far from Bucha, and the war came to us instantly. Already that evening you could hear explosions, and a few days later shooting started near my home.

Kovalenko revealed that his job in the army involves reconnaissance and radiolocation. What does a typical day look like?

You wake up early and have 15 minutes to get ready, to make coffee, eat, and get moving. You do everything in a trench with mice and in constant dirt. The shift lasts a minimum of 12 hours a day, with no holidays, weekends, or days of rest. And like that for 2.5 years. In my unit there were two of us radio operators, so we could more or less conveniently divide the work. You’re in chats, working the whole time, and how many lives you save depends on your reconnaissance of the area. We corrected artillery fire, our pilots, drones… We marked points of enemy activity. Above all, we tried to save our people. And at the same time you have to camouflage yourself. My radar site was a priority for the Russians to capture during their attack on Avdiivka in 2023. We received information that we were being pursued as their number-one target.

Ukrainian forces withdrew from Avdiivka in February 2024, with GM Sergey Karjakin, given a six-month ban by FIDE in 2022 and sanctioned by the European Union earlier this year, filming a video from the ruined city shortly afterward.

This is Sergey Karjakin, a Russian chess grandmaster and 2015 Chess World Cup winner, enjoying the views of destroyed Avdiivka.

Sports above politics, indeed. 🙄 pic.twitter.com/si6wcJht2a

— UNITED24 Media (@United24media) March 1, 2024

Kovalenko said he was close to death a few times and was asked whether he was afraid:

No. At the time I wondered, had I lived my life well? Or rather, how to explain it. I didn’t think about the brevity of life, but about whether my life had sense if it ended now. I thought in that fashion, rather than being afraid. There was adrenaline, a kind of fear, but no panic.

I didn't think about the brevity of life, but about whether my life had sense if it ended now.

—Igor Kovalenko

He elaborated on the impact of life as a soldier on him:

I don’t fully know how the war has changed me, but at times I see, when Facebook reminds me of my posts before the war. I look at them as if they were written by someone else. Firstly, many details in life that I worried about in reality have no meaning. What we worry about during sleepless nights, our ambitions, depression brought on by unfulfilled goals, that’s all details.

In the trenches near Avdiivka he revealed they had to survive on nine liters of water a week, for drinking and washing. That influenced how he feels about chess:

And when you’re in such a situation not for a month or a week but over a year, then all these chess scandals, who they let in, who they didn’t, who argued with whom, have no meaning. And that’s what the war changed for me. I know what’s important and what isn’t.

All these chess scandals, who they let in, who they didn't, who argued with whom, have no meaning.

—Igor Kovalenko

He expands on the topic:

Secondly, I began to appreciate life, to manage to live and not only work. All the time we’re running about and we have no moment to look at what we’ve achieved. When I left the trench every morning I looked at the sunrise and observed. Hedgehogs are stomping around. Field mice. Some kind of snake is crawling. It’s May. You wonder why the trees are blooming. You hear explosions and shooting. But you’re alive, you see all that and you’re simply grateful to God, you understand that you need to be content with it. To try to live that day and draw the maximum out of it. Because you don’t know if there will be a tomorrow. If tomorrow you’ll be alive.

Zielinski asks if the uncertainty about tomorrow is the worst part of war:

The most terrible thing about war is when you see that your friend… is dying in your arms, or under some bush, and you simply can’t help him. In war nowadays you see even more such scenes via cameras and drones. You can only observe as your friend is ripped to pieces by an explosion or his head and arms are lying disconnected from his body. Or you see the moment when your friend will be taken into captivity, or he prefers to blow himself up, because that’s better than Russian captivity. Death in such a moment is better. I think that even in German concentration camps it was somewhat better than in Russian captivity.

Kovalenko points to chess when asked if the scenes he’s witnessed disturb him in everyday life:

Particularly in chess it’s important to have a clear head. The war doesn’t disturb me in chess, but I dream of it. What disturbs me more is that I’ve ruined my health. I have raised pressure in my eyeballs and a non-stop headache. Here I’m playing chess on painkillers. I’m only 36 years old, but I feel like I’m 57 or more.

3 years of war. Sometimes I don't believe I look so old. pic.twitter.com/6f5oah2huc

— GrossLogos (@GmKovalenkoIgor) March 5, 2025

Kovalenko nevertheless managed to keep playing some chess online even from the trenches.

Stream TT)) pic.twitter.com/D6oPhfe165

— GrossLogos (@GmKovalenkoIgor) September 10, 2024

Asked if that’s one of the few pastimes open to a soldier, he responds:

Basically, yes. We played chess. As a believer, I read the bible a lot. I also downloaded books, preferably philosophical or historical, in order to distract myself from the present and occupy my mind. If the only thing you do for so many months is work and sleep in a hole dug in the ground, you have to think about something else to distract yourself. Even when I wasn’t at war, I dreamed of Avdiivka. It wasn’t often, but I also dreamed of chess, of tournaments.

In September 2023, Kovalenko was awarded the Order “For Courage” of the 3rd Degree by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He explains how it came out of the blue:

That was a funny story. When I was in the trenches near Donetsk they called me, saying that tomorrow I had to be in Kyiv. I jokingly told them to sort it out themselves with my superior, because I have to defend my country here. And then literally half an hour later my commander called me and said documents had arrived and I had to be in Kyiv immediately. They dragged me out of there, washed me, because I was all dirty at the time, gave me new clothes… Well, “new” is an exaggeration, because they simply gathered together clothes in the unit from those which were more or less fresh. And I went. They told me how I was to behave, a kind of etiquette, and immediately I was thinking of ways to break it. I decided that as I approach the president I’d wink at him. He came within a meter of me when he was giving me the order and I winked at him, and he immediately responded. I made him laugh a lot. He’s a lively man, he joked a lot. It was funny.  

This is not fake. That's life. The President awarded me the Order "For Courage, 3rd degree". pic.twitter.com/OIgT0gZrPx

— GrossLogos (@GmKovalenkoIgor) September 14, 2023

Kovalenko was asked how he felt when he saw Russian President Vladimir Putin and American President Donald Trump together in a limousine in Alaska:

The world is cynical and we simply see that. Once we used to think that the world is better, but it’s always been like that. I look at it all like a market. Unfortunately, Ukraine is now perceived as a commodity which the world powers can trade for other interests. Here morality, all those high ideals, good, evil, that all no longer has any meaning. Or maybe just for the public. I don’t think it really has any meaning for Americans how many Russian or Ukrainian soldiers die. I’m not sure if it even has meaning for half of the Europeans. For everyone the important thing is that the war in Ukraine remains in Ukraine. That it doesn’t spread to the world. And that’s all.

And does Kovalenko expect anything to change soon in Ukraine?

I think everything is already at its limit. The Russian economy is at its limit, the Ukrainian economy is at its limit, society is at its limit. Of course we can continue, I think another year, two, but if we continue longer then irreversible consequences will begin. That means that reconstruction will be impossible even in 20 years. I think that now, if nothing happens for another half a year, there’s no progress, then this war will soon end. But the problem is that even if it ends, everything will in any case be destroyed. There will be no trade relations, demining the land will take years, and at the same time we’ll see the total militarization of the whole world, which is happening right now. Therefore it seems to me that something may change soon. It was the same with World War I. There were local wars, but when the whole world understood that they couldn’t reach an understanding, the world war began. From the Russia-Ukraine war we see that we simply live in different worlds and can’t reach an understanding. It’s as if we’re talking to aliens. The conflicts won’t disappear but will spill over into the economic, social, and cultural realms. That’s why I think the war, in its broader context, will never end.

That's why I think the war, in its broader context, will never end.

—Igor Kovalenko

So Kovalenko didn’t end on a note of hope, but there is hope that we can see him more at the chessboard. He’s a member of the provisional Ukrainian team for the 2025 European Team Championship that is set to take place in Batumi, Georgia, October 5-14, along with GMs Ruslan Ponomariov, Andrei Volokitin, Anton Korobov, and Ihor Samunenkov. 

He's also planning to return to play for the German team Viernheim. Club Chairman Stefan Martin commented:

His return means much more to us than just a sporting boost. After years of anxiety, the club is greatly relieved to know Kovalenko is in relative safety.

The Chess Bundesliga 2025-6 season begins on September 27.