Russian court bars anti-war Yabloko party from parliamentary election

On Monday, Russia's Supreme Court ended Yabloko's participation in this autumn's parliamentary election. The ruling, which upheld a lawsuit brought by the pro-Kremlin party Rodina, means the last openly anti-war party with a national profile will not appear on the ballot when Russians vote from September 18 to 20. Yabloko's leader, Nikolai Rybakov, said the party had broken no laws and would appeal. Given the court that issued the ruling, and the judge who delivered it, the prospects for that appeal appear slender.

A copyright claim that removed a party from the ballot

The legal mechanism used to bar Yabloko is worth examining, because it reveals something about how the Russian authorities now manage political competition. Rodina, a small nationalist party that reliably supports the Kremlin, sued Yabloko over three claims: that the opposition party had infringed Rodina's copyright in its campaign materials, that it had engaged in extremist activities, and that it had received illegal foreign financing. The first claim, about copyright, is the kind of dispute that in a functioning legal system would be resolved with an injunction or damages. The second and third claims, involving extremism and foreign money, are the standard charges levelled against Russian opposition groups, and they carry severe penalties under Russian law. The court did not need to prove all three. It needed only to accept one.

Yabloko denies the charges. Grigory Yavlinsky, one of the party's three founders, said the authorities removed Yabloko because they feared its programme, which calls for an election "for peace, freedom and a life without fear." Removing a party with such a platform from the ballot without genuine legal grounds, he argued, was "the political system exposing itself."

The judge who banned Memorial

The presiding judge was Vyacheslav Kirillov. His record makes clear what kind of jurist he is. In April, Kirillov banned Memorial, Russia's most prominent human rights organisation, and designated it an extremist group. Memorial had documented Soviet-era repressions for more than three decades. Kirillov also previously threw out legal complaints against the Russian prison service filed by Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who spent years in Russian prisons before his death in custody in 2024. That a judge with this portfolio was assigned to Yabloko's case tells you what the outcome was likely to be before arguments began.

Outside the court, around 500 people gathered during the nine-hour hearing. They distributed apples, a reference to Yabloko's name, which means "apple" in Russian and derives from the initials of its three founders: Yavlinsky, Boldyrev and Lukin. By the end of the session, security services had threatened the crowd with arrest. Young men were warned they could be taken to an army enlistment office, a threat that carries particular weight in a country that has conducted multiple rounds of military mobilisation since 2022.

Why the opposition rallied behind Yabloko

In the days before the hearing, a group of prominent opposition figures living abroad had issued an appeal for people to support Yabloko. The signatories included Yulia Navalnaya, who now leads the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) founded by her late husband, along with the politician Lyubov Sobol, the activist Ilya Yashin, and Andrei Pivovarov, coordinator of the Russian Antiwar Committee, who lives in exile in Germany. The writer Dmitry Bykov and the human rights activist Oleg Orlov also added their names.

This coalition was striking because these figures come from different opposition traditions, some of which have been sceptical about participating in Russian elections at all. The calculation, as Pivovarov explained, was not that Yabloko could end the war or bring about swift political change. It was simpler: "There would have been a dozen parties on the ballot who are pro-war, and one that is pro-peace. The war wouldn't end even if Yabloko were to get representatives into the State Duma. But we would have seen that a lot of Russians oppose the war." The point was visibility, not legislative power.

Navalnaya made a similar observation. She said the Kremlin had originally been prepared to let Yabloko stand, but changed course when it saw what was happening: people were starting to join forces. The danger, from the authorities' perspective, was less about Yabloko itself than about the possibility that millions of Russians might use the party as a vehicle to express their real feelings about Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine.

Kremlin factions and possible miscalculations

The political scientist Ivan Preobrazhensky has offered a more specific explanation for what happened. He suggested the ban could be a consequence of rivalry between Kremlin factions. According to his reading, the security bloc associated with the Federal Security Service (FSB) may have wanted Yabloko to act as a counterweight to New People, a party widely regarded as a project of Sergey Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration. On this account, the FSB faction initially tolerated Yabloko because it would draw votes from a rival faction's vehicle. When Yabloko began attracting genuine anti-war support, the calculation shifted.

There is an alternative version. Kiriyenko himself may have wanted Yabloko on the ballot to create an impression of political competition, but underestimated how much anti-war sentiment the party would channel. Either way, Preobrazhensky's analysis rests on the same observation: surveys indicate substantial demand for a political alternative opposed to the war, and the government appears not to have anticipated the scale of that demand.

The political scientist Mikhail Vinogradov offers a different reading. He thinks the Kremlin may have calculated that a poor Yabloko result would have been more useful than a ban. A small vote share for the sole anti-war party would have allowed the authorities to claim that the population stood solidly behind the war. It would also have demoralised those who oppose it. Barring Yabloko entirely, on Vinogradov's logic, concedes that the Kremlin cannot risk letting anti-war sentiment be measured at all.

The monitoring gap

Yabloko's exclusion has a practical consequence beyond the ballot paper. Russian election law gives registered parties the right to send representatives to monitor polling stations. With Yabloko deregistered, those monitors disappear. Roman Udot, a specialist in electoral observation, has pointed out that Yabloko has also facilitated access for independent observers in previous elections. The party's removal makes it harder to scrutinise the count in September.

This matters because the State Duma election will take place under conditions that independent observers have long found restrictive. International missions from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe have been unable to operate properly in Russia for years. Domestic monitoring organisations have been squeezed by foreign-agent designations and outright bans. Removing the last opposition party's observers tightens the circle further.

A nervous summer

The court ruling comes at a moment of growing unease inside Russia. Margarita Zavadskaya, of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, points to data from the Russian Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), which regularly asks respondents whether they feel optimistic or worried about the country's situation. In late July, 57 per cent said they were worried. That is the highest figure since the mobilisation announced in September 2022, which prompted hundreds of thousands of men to flee the country.

FOM's surveys should be read with caution. The organisation is state-adjacent, and respondents in Russia have obvious reasons to understate opposition to official policy. But Zavadskaya argues that a sharp increase in reported anxiety, even in a poll with these limitations, is significant. An increase of this magnitude in midsummer, when public mood is typically more stable, suggests, in her words, that "something is not going according to plan."

She cites several reasons for the shift: an increase in drone attacks on Russian territory, rising military casualties, fires at military warehouses, and persistent rumours of a fresh mobilisation. The summer of 2026, she says, has been the most unsettling period for Russians since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. She also believes that support for the war is declining, not growing.

The Kremlin, in her assessment, has reason to be nervous. "For the Kremlin, the ideal scenario would be a boring election with low turnout and no noteworthy events," she said. "Right now, though, this seems unlikely, as the situation in the run-up to the election does not appear normal, nor does it give the impression that the government has the situation under control."