Yabloko is out, and with this vote Putin is charting the next stages of the war

From early on Monday morning, hundreds of young people began to gather at the entrance to the Supreme Court at 15 Povarskaya Street, in the Novy Arbat district of the Russian capital. The queue formed in an orderly fashion along the building, remaining there throughout the day, chanting slogans and singing, as they awaited a verdict that had already been decided in advance. Formally, the proceedings before the Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation were merely a hearing convened to hear an appeal by one electoral list against another, ahead of the State Duma elections in September. In essence, however, it was a trial staged by the authorities, with the help of the state media, to delegitimise the last political party opposed to the war, exclude it from the ballot and thus pave the way, sooner or later, for its definitive dissolution. The party in question, Yabloko – ‘apple’ in Russian – is a small liberal-democratic party, the oldest in post-Soviet Russia, founded in the early 1990s by the economist Grigory Yavlinsky and affiliated with ALDE until that organisation was declared undesirable in 2025.

Over the last twenty years of Putinism’s ascendancy, Yabloko has garnered modest support, losing access to federal politics in 2007 and retaining only a small number of seats in certain regional legislative assemblies, largely thanks to the steady support of the middle class in major cities. Whilst it is true that, until now, the party had regularly taken part in all parliamentary elections since 1993, it is equally true that, in the meantime, the institutional conditions that guaranteed its political viability have changed radically. What was mildly tolerated until 2022 became taboo following the invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions regime has been tightened and the crackdown has become relentless, to the extent that several prominent figures within the movement, including the two vice-presidents Maxim Kruglov and Lev Shlosberg, were first declared foreign agents, then imprisoned, and finally sentenced to prison terms for spreading false information or for discrediting the Armed Forces.

Even the election period has required the authorities to tighten the screws even further. Despite their name, elections in Russia have not, for decades, been based on pluralistic competition between different political groups or on free, equal and secret voting. On the contrary, at whatever level of government, they are a staged spectacle, orchestrated down to the smallest detail by a diverse group of actors who ultimately answer to the presidential administration and, more recently, to the FSB’s service for the protection of the constitutional order and the fight against terrorism. As Alberto Masoero, a historian at the University of Turin, explained in his essay "Gestione del potere e selezione della classe dirigente nel putinismo" (2024), the system, institutionalised in the early 2000s, rather than allowing for the expression of popular sovereignty as provided for in the 1993 Constitution, is designed to ensure the prudent management of power, to mediate conflicts between the various factions of the elite (local, economic-financial and security services) and, ultimately, to guarantee the stability of the regime and the personal survival of the leader.

It therefore came as no small surprise that on 29 July the Central Electoral Commission registered Yabloko – along with nine other parties belonging to what is known as the ‘systemic opposition’ – a party which for the past four years has persistently stood in local elections with a slogan that is provocative to say the least: ‘For peace and freedom!’. The news thus sparked mixed reactions. Cui prodest? some analysts asked. If elections are no longer a contest between different visions of society and the outcome at the polls must be carefully orchestrated, who – and for what reason – allowed the registration of a party which, being less controllable than others, would have risked complicating the Kremlin’s plans? The disillusioned, including the émigré political scientist Ekaterina Shulman, have highlighted how Yabloko’s participation could serve to dilute the support for the most popular parties of the systemic opposition, thereby enabling United Russia, led by its lead candidate and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, to secure an even more substantial absolute majority than in 2021. At the same time, the meagre result that Yabloko would have been allowed to achieve (around 2 per cent according to the plans) would have shown the world that only a minority of Russians wanted a ceasefire and negotiations. The plan seemed well thought out. However, it was the usual unforeseen factor that threw a spanner in the works: reality. In the days following registration, whilst the systemic opposition parties – concerned about the drain on their vote share – denounced the liberals as a den of traitors, guilty of seeking to prevent “the liberation of the territories occupied by the neo-Nazi regime” in Kyiv, a wave of popularity swept over the Yabloko party on social media. “Even our federal headquarters on Pyatnitskaya Street in Moscow was literally overrun by onlookers and supporters,” one of Yabloko’s spokeswomen explained to Il Foglio. As was the case when Boris Nadezhdin (who was subsequently disqualified) stood as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, tens of thousands of people have begun to show an interest in a movement previously considered marginal – a sign that demand is growing in Russia, particularly amongst the younger generations, for a political approach that breaks with the experience of war in recent years.

This sudden upsurge must have prompted the authorities to fall back on the position of the systemic opposition parties – from Gennady Zyuganov’s Communists to Sergei Mironov’s Social Populists and Leonid Slutsky’s National Liberals – who, since 29 July, had been lashing out viciously against a party of defeatists, guilty of calling for a ceasefire before Moscow could celebrate its victory (pobèda)—a noun which, by virtue of its assonance with the victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), constantly echoes in Kremlin propaganda. Hence the legal action, orchestrated by a small ultra-nationalist party, Ròdina (Motherland), led by Alexei Zhuravlev, a deputy active within the ranks of the LDPR’s national-liberals. The statement of claim was based on grounds ranging from the laughable to the grotesque, such as a breach of the US Army’s copyright (!) for the publication on Yabloko’s website of a photograph of Hiroshima. Monday’s hearing thus took place amid great agitation before the single-judge panel presided over by Vyacheslav Kirillov, a judge already well known for his zeal in revoking Novaya Gazeta’s licence, in rejecting Navalny’s appeals against the prison administration, and in declaring the international Memorial movement an extremist organisation.

Although the outcome of this appeal was also a foregone conclusion, the hearing, rather than concluding in a matter of minutes, dragged on for seven long hours, in order to give the impression that the Court was carefully weighing up all the interests at stake, just as happens in legal systems where the judiciary is independent of the executive. At one point, however, the hearing took a Kafkaesque turn: in a dramatic twist, the representative of the Central Electoral Commission – the body that had initially admitted Yabloko – intervened in support of the appellant’s arguments. Waving a document which financial intelligence had reportedly delivered to his office on 7 August – though he specified that it must remain confidential – the Commission’s representative informed those present that some candidates on Yabloko’s list had received funding from abroad. There, then, is the proof: collusion with the enemy! How it is possible that the Commission only discovered this after the event is entirely irrelevant. Rationality and transparency have no place in proceedings such as these, in which, instead, the inscrutability of power must be revealed in all its theatrical grandeur. Following the providential testimony of the Commission member – who thereby also publicly demonstrated his remorse – the Attorney General’s Office took the floor, asking the Court to exclude the Yabloko list from the elections. The verdict was, in the end, a mere formality, hastily announced by the judge-official that evening.

The ruling is not final and, as promised by Secretary Nikolai Rybakov, will be appealed. The course of events, however, is clear: as Vedomosti noted this morning, the law stipulates that parties must be dissolved if they have not participated in federal elections for more than seven years. For Yabloko, the last such election was in 2021. Within two years, barring any sudden turn of events, the party will be dissolved. In the meantime, there is room on the ballot paper for ten lists in September, whose sole motto is: “Forward, to victory!”.