With Russia’s parliamentary elections now imminent, the registration and subsequent hurried removal of the liberal Yabloko’s federal list from the State Duma ballot stand out as the campaign’s most consequential event — both for democratic opposition inside and outside of the country and the Kremlin itself.
The crackdown on the only party openly calling for peace began months before the election, targeting its most prominent figures, and has continued throughout the campaign, which ends with voting from September 18-20. A recent poll by a small, independent research group with access to voters inside Russia suggests Yabloko could have won 20-25% of the vote had it remained on the ballot, challenging the Communist Party (KPRF) for second place behind United Russia.
The authorities have long had ample scope to “adjust” the ruling party’s result by transferring votes between tallies. In 2024, manipulation inflated Putin’s total by 22–25 million votes in the 2024 presidential vote, adding roughly a third to his actual vote count.
Even so, keeping Yabloko convincingly below the 5% Duma threshold would have been extremely difficult, especially in the northwest, which includes the great cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, where its support is strongest, and voters tend to be more critical of the ruling party.
The Presidential Administration would have needed blatant fraud on a much greater scale, from ballot stuffing and rewriting vote counts to incidents such as a territorial election commission chair denying observers access to ballot bags and other underhanded tactics.
Such fraud would have seriously undermined the image the Kremlin has sought through its wartime elections, including the forthcoming Duma vote: a society united behind the president and his decision to continue the war in Ukraine. After receiving confidential polling a month before the election, it may have judged that conspicuously removing Yabloko’s federal list would do less damage to that image than the fraud needed to keep the party out of the Duma.
At the same time, with Yabloko’s most recognizable figures already forced out through discriminatory legal designations or criminal charges, its current 20-25% poll rating effectively guarantees that none of its more than 100 candidates still registered in single-member State Duma districts will win a seat.
But Yabloko and other pro-democracy movements still operating inside Russia in the fifth year of the war face a greater threat than failure in the coming federal elections. The Kremlin is also seeking to defeat the party in every regional election it is contesting this year, stripping it of all its five remaining seats in regional legislatures.
Yabloko fielded candidates for nine regional parliaments, but it remains on the proportional representation ballot in only one: Novgorod Oblast. In recent months, the Kremlin has secured the removal of the other lists, usually repeating the federal pattern: spoiler parties sue Yabloko on trumped-up grounds, including alleged intellectual property violations, amid attacks on its anti-war stance.
All three legislatures where Yabloko holds seats have elections this year: Pskov Oblast, Saint Petersburg, and the Republic of Karelia. These seats exempt its lists from signature requirements at all levels, including the State Duma, bypassing the main barrier generally used to exclude democratic opposition candidates: entirely opaque signature checks controlled by Russia’s security agencies.
Yet its sole remaining list is likely to miss the 5% threshold in Novgorod Oblast, where Yabloko held no seats in the outgoing regional legislature and only one on the capital’s city council. With the Kremlin removing its strongest candidates, the roughly 70 regional candidates remaining in single-member districts are unlikely to succeed.
Losing regional representation would likely mark the beginning of the end for Yabloko as a legal political force. The Kremlin previously stripped two other pro-democracy parties, Civilian Power and PARNAS, of their mandates, then revoked their registration after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Yabloko is the last officially registered pro-democratic party; other groups have failed to obtain registration both before and after 2022.
The consequences of Yabloko’s demise would extend across Russia’s remaining democratic opposition and civil society, affecting citizens who still seek ways to oppose Putin’s policies.
First, the signature exemption gives fragmented opposition groups a practical incentive to cooperate through a registered party. Boris Nemtsov’s election to the Yaroslavl regional legislature in 2013 gave PARNAS access to State Duma elections without collecting signatures. That exemption helped attract Alexei Navalny’s Party of Progress and other opposition groups into a coalition formed in 2015, with the aim of contesting the following year’s parliamentary elections on a joint list.
Yabloko now offers a similar route. Its candidates include Ilya Kostyukov in Belgorod, who headed the local team of Candidates’ Headquarters during Boris Nadezhdin’s blocked 2024 presidential bid. This network trains Independent candidates and provides campaign support, helping activists turn their local work into electoral campaigns.
Yabloko has also nominated representatives of Rassvet, the unregistered political party and civic movement built around Yekaterina Duntsova, a local politician who was also barred from the 2024 presidential election. Rassvet is developing regional and city branches that bring together anti-war activists and regional civic initiatives. Losing Yabloko’s signature exemption would weaken these groups’ consolidation and make it harder to sustain cooperation through a network of civic initiatives.
Second, losing regional deputies would deprive human rights groups of allies able to file formal inquiries, obtain official information, and challenge government narratives from official parliamentary rostrums. By taking up cases brought by local activists and connecting them with legal assistance, these deputies help civic groups defend citizens and sustain their work under growing repression.
Saint Petersburg’s Boris Vishnevsky exemplified this role, helping detained protesters secure legal assistance and demanding that prosecutors explain the criminalization of anti-war speech. Designated a “foreign agent” in March 2024, he was forced to relinquish his seat.
Yabloko’s short-lived registration briefly rallied exiled opposition figures and democratic forces inside Russia around a common electoral campaign to threaten the Kremlin by eroding its image of a full-fledged society consolidated around the war.
That collective action — that our recent CEPA report identifies as essential to keeping future democratic change possible — is now even more fragile than it was during all years of increased pressure after the full-scale invasion.
Mikhail Komin is a fellow with the Democratic Resilience program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
