Russia Bars Last Anti-War Voices From Duma Elections — SkimNews
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- Boris Nadezhdin fled to Paris in late July after the Justice Ministry designated him a "foreign agent" on July 10 and convicted him of displaying "extremist symbols" tied to a Navalny video link; he has suspended all political activity on his lawyers' advice.
- The Yabloko party, Russia's sole openly anti-war party, was barred from the party-list ballot after a Moscow court upheld an Aug. 7 lawsuit by the nationalist Rodina party alleging violations over Western donor funding.
- Yabloko saw social media traffic double in one week in late July and its Instagram following grow by 100,000 in a few weeks, per a Russian election monitoring project, as young Russians posted coded "apple" videos endorsing the party before the ruling.
- United Russia's approval rating dropped to its lowest point since the full-scale invasion began, coinciding with Ukrainian drone strikes over Moscow, fuel lines stretching more than half a mile, and disruptions to Wildberries warehouse deliveries.
- State Duma elections scheduled for Sept. 18-20 will be the first since the 2022 invasion; United Russia holds roughly 70% of the 450 seats, with the rest filled by what analyst Dmitry Gudkov called "players created in the Kremlin."
- Putin told a United Russia congress in August that the elections would "reaffirm the stability of the state" and "become an expression of the common will of millions of people."
Why it matters: By purging even modest anti-war voices, the Kremlin forfeits a managed pressure valve that would have allowed public discontent to register through the ballot — United Russia's lowest approval rating since the invasion coincided directly with the crackdown, and analyst Nikolai Petrov called the Yabloko ban a "huge victory" that symbolically validates the anti-war movement the state tried to silence.
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