In the seventh round of the European Team Championship in the Georgian city Batumi, the number one and number two teams played each other. Number one was Ukraine and the Netherlands were second. Ukraine won the match. Two days later, the Netherlands rather disappointingly finished seventh and Ukraine became European champion.
The biggest contribution to Ukraine’s victory was made by grandmaster Igor Kovalenko, who scored 6½ out of 8. He played on fourth board, even though he had the highest rating of the Ukrainian players. Perhaps he had asked for that humble position himself, because until two months earlier, he had not played any serious games for a few years. He had been in the trenches.
In August of this year, he was able to play in a classical tournament for the first time after a long interruption, the Rubinstein Memorial in the Polish city Polanica-Zdroj, where he drew all nine of his games. On chess.com there is an article by Colin McGourty:
https://www.chess.com/news/view/kovalenko-ukraine-frontline-chessboard-poland
There we can read what Kovalenko had told a Polish journalist about his gruesome war experiences.
When he woke up on February 24, 2022, the first day of the Russian invasion, he saw messages from his friends on his phone. War, war, war! He went back to sleep thinking that the next few days would be difficult and that he could use some rest. He was in the town of Gostomel, north of Kyiv, at the time. That evening, he heard explosions, and a few days later, he heard gunshots near his home.
Shortly afterwards, he joined the army. He worked as a communications specialist for a mobile radar station. Describing a typical day he said:
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 2½ years. In my unit there were two 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.
In 2023, he was stationed in Avdiivka, where his radar station became a special target for Russian troops. The city was lost, and then Sergey Karjakin sent a video of the ruins around the world, not as an indictment of the destruction, but as a celebration of Russian triumph.
What were the most terrible things for Igor Kovalenko? If a friend dies in your arms, he said, or under a bush, and you just can’t help him. Or if you see that a friend will be captured or blow himself up, because that is better than Russian captivity.
When he played chess, he could shut himself off from the war, but he dreams about the war. And his health is ruined. His eye pressure has gone up and he has constant headaches. He plays chess on painkillers; he is only 36 years old and feels like he is 57 or older.
In the trenches, he read the Bible and books on philosophy and history which he had downloaded, and he played chess in online tournaments. He learned to enjoy life one day at a time. When he came out of the trench in the morning, he saw the sunrise, and hedgehogs and field mice and a writhing snake. It is May, the trees are in bloom. You hear explosions and gunshots, but you are alive and you are grateful to God and you understand that you have to be content with that, with living that day and making the most of it.
In September 2023, Kovalenko was suddenly sent to Kyiv on short notice. He was given more or less clean clothes, because he was to receive an award for bravery from President Zelensky. He was told how to behave in the presence of the president, and he immediately decided that he would do things differently. He winked at the president when he presented him with his award, and the president winked back. “I often made him laugh. He is a lively man, he joked a lot. It was funny.”
Kovalenko now has an army position that is not directly on the front line. It seems that he has also been given more leave, because he had played in Poland and Batumi and planned to play again for his German club Viernheim in the Bundesliga.
Nevertheless, he said: “Until the war ends, there is no chance that I’ll return to chess seriously.” And when asked when the war would end, he was very pessimistic.
Click here to view Van Wely-Kovalenko, Batumi 2025