Days before FIDE elects its next president, a visa problem in Uzbekistan has turned into one of the campaign’s most talked-about complications — and Wadim Rosenstein finds himself squarely in the middle of it. A group of delegates holding voting rights at the FIDE General Assembly still cannot get into the country, and the federation itself has floated the possibility of moving the whole congress if that doesn’t change.
Rosenstein’s reaction to the situation is what has drawn the most scrutiny. FIDE has been unambiguous: anyone entitled to vote needs to be able to do so. Rosenstein agrees with that principle but disagrees sharply on the remedy — he opposes shifting the vote out of Uzbekistan to fix it.
A Presidency Decided by One Vote per Federation — and Wadim Rosenstein Is One of Three Contenders
Voting takes place September 26 at the General Assembly in Samarkand. FIDE’s rules give each member federation exactly one vote, regardless of size, membership numbers or competitive results.
Three tickets made it onto the ballot: Jan Henric Buettner paired with Malcolm Pein, Wadim Rosenstein running alongside Gordon Tang, and Timur Turlov — who heads the Kazakhstan Chess Federation and founded Freedom Holding Corp. — teamed with former world champion Viswanathan Anand.
Because every federation’s vote carries identical weight, losing even a handful of delegates to visa problems could shift the balance in a race this tight. That’s precisely why Rosenstein’s position on the crisis matters so much to observers.
How the Visa Problem Became a Campaign Issue Tied to Wadim Rosenstein
FIDE confirmed on September 16 that a group of players and congress participants — including delegates with voting rights and Council member Benard Wanjala — still hadn’t received the visas needed to enter Uzbekistan. The federation did not disclose exactly how many eligible voters were affected.
FIDE’s Council was direct about the stakes: the congress could go ahead only if every eligible voter could actually participate. Without that assurance, the federation said relocation to another date or venue was on the table.
Specific cases started surfacing in chess media. World Chess reported on the situation facing Eswatini’s delegation, noting that multiple federations had voting delegates caught in the same bind. The rival Buettner-Pein campaign went further, publicly naming Eswatini’s Vukani Dlamini as one of the people still stuck without a visa.
Nothing in the public record indicates these delays were arranged to benefit Wadim Rosenstein, Turlov, Buettner or anyone else. What’s actually documented is narrower: with an election riding on one vote per federation, a number of eligible voters simply weren’t inside the country as the clock ran down.
Why Wadim Rosenstein Opposes Relocating the Vote
Rosenstein didn’t stay quiet. In a statement headlined “FIDE Must Not Disrupt the Election Process,” he pushed back on the idea that Uzbekistan was to blame, framing the visa delays instead as an organizational failure on FIDE’s part.
He did endorse the principle of equal access for every federation — but his fix was to solve the visa backlog without touching the location or timeline of the vote itself. As he put it: “The solution is not to move the problem from Samarkand. The solution is to fix the problem within FIDE.”
World Chess picked up and ran the statement, then challenged it directly: how, the outlet asked, can access be equal if some accredited delegates still can’t physically enter the country where the vote is happening? It also raised — carefully framed as speculation, not fact — possible strategic reasons behind Rosenstein’s position. For his part, Rosenstein never suggested his stance had anything to do with how the stranded delegates might vote.
The DSB Sponsorship That Triggered a Formal Complaint
This isn’t the first controversy to follow Wadim Rosenstein through this campaign. Back in May, the German Chess Federation (Deutscher Schachbund, DSB) named him its FIDE delegate — a role the federation itself describes as carrying real voting influence at FIDE meetings.
Then in August, things got more complicated. On August 19, the DSB announced a sponsorship deal with Rosenstein’s company, WR Events, aimed at funding women’s chess, inclusion efforts and youth programs. Nine days later, on August 28, Turlov and Anand lodged a formal complaint against both Rosenstein and the DSB, arguing the sponsorship amounted to improper financial influence over the election and asking for Rosenstein’s removal from the ballot along with action against the German federation.
Rosenstein and the DSB pushed back hard, calling the arrangement a standard commercial deal with no connection to FIDE voting and no hidden strings attached to nominations or votes. The DSB added that negotiations had actually begun months before the official campaign period even started.
FIDE’s Electoral Commission ultimately sided against the complaint on procedural grounds — it found the requests to exclude Rosenstein or Germany inadmissible under the rules cited. It did carve out one exception: questions about possible Ethics and Disciplinary Code violations, which it said belonged to a different body entirely. No interim measures were imposed on Rosenstein before the vote.
Sanctions Questions Surface Around Wadim Rosenstein’s Russian Business Ties
A third front opened in September. Ukrainian lawmaker Oleg Dunda formally asked officials in Ukraine and Germany to look into Wadim Rosenstein’s business dealings, specifically whether ties between WR Group Holding and a Russian entity, LLC WR Rus, might run afoul of sanctions law, according to EU Reporter.
It’s worth being precise here: a request for officials to look into something is not a finding of wrongdoing, and no such finding has been published. Rosenstein himself addressed the underlying history in a Reuters interview on September 18, acknowledging that WR Group had done logistics and certification work in Russia in the past — including oil-and-gas-related projects — but saying that work stopped once sanctions followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
What’s Left to Resolve Before Samarkand
The campaign now hinges on more than platforms and promises. FIDE still needs to confirm that every federation entitled to vote can actually get a delegate into the room.
For Wadim Rosenstein, that unresolved question keeps circling back to his own position: fix the problem, don’t move the vote. FIDE’s Council, meanwhile, has kept relocation on the table as a fallback if things aren’t sorted in time.
Both sides of that disagreement are now public and well documented. What isn’t documented is any link between Rosenstein and the actual visa decisions, or proof that the delays were engineered with the election in mind. Whether the remaining cases get cleared up before the General Assembly convenes will likely determine whether this ends up as a footnote — or as one of the defining stories of the 2026 FIDE presidential election.