FMSvyatoslav Lisenkov

Svyatoslav Lisenkov learned chess from his grandfather at six. His family moved from Naro-Fominsk to Podolsk so that he could train at the Pakhra sports school. His early teachers included Vladimir Yenukyan and Leonid Nozdrachev; later he worked with Andrey Obodchuk, Denis Khairullin and Igor Yagupov. At the Primakov Gymnasium, he helped its team win Russia's White Rook school championship three years running, from 2022 through 2024. He took bronze in the Russian under-fifteen championship in 2023, then won the title the following year with eight points from nine games.

In 2026, Lisenkov won both under-sixteen rapid and blitz gold at the Central and Northern Asian Championships in Kyrgyzstan. He chose the older under-twenty section for the classical competition in an attempt to earn a title norm, although he did not achieve one there. Later that year, an unbeaten second place in an Azerbaijani grandmaster round-robin brought him an International Master norm. In a July 2026 interview, he said that he had moved to home schooling in ninth grade and devoted more than six hours a day to independent chess study. English was his favourite school subject, and history and social studies also interested him.