Journey to the Centre of the Earth

On his own web site, French Grandmaster Maxime Vachier-Lagrave gave a first-hand account of his way to Yekaterinburg through the travel bureaucracy that has been built up to deal with the pandemic: “I arrived [...] on Wednesday 14 April with GM Sébastien Mazé, not without a few administrative problems due to the difficulty of travelling at the moment”, he writes. And indeed, it was only after much patience that a travel permit was issued by the Ministry of Sports — that, apparently, proved even more difficult than obtaining a Russian visa. Photo © Maria Alekseevna Emelianova.