Russia’s Supreme Court has shut an anti-war party out of the country’s federal parliamentary elections, underscoring how little room remains for dissent as the Kremlin tightens its grip on political life.
Earlier this month, the court barred the marginal Yabloko party from contesting the elections scheduled for mid-September.
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Why did Russian authorities permit Yabloko to survive for so long — and why move now to keep it off the ballot?
In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, it may seem almost inconceivable that any legal political party still openly opposes the war in Ukraine.
Yet that is precisely what Yabloko, founded in the early 1990s, has continued to do.
Yabloko had registered candidates for September’s federal parliamentary elections, the first such vote since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
But earlier this month, the Supreme Court prevented the party from fielding candidates after a pro-Kremlin nationalist party complained of alleged copyright infringements in Yabloko’s application documents.
On 17 August, the party — led by long-time member Nikolai Rybakov — lost its appeal against the ruling.
Yabloko party leader Nikolai Rybakov outside Russia’s supreme court on 10 August
That same day, Yabloko’s deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg received an 11-year prison sentence for “discrediting” Russia’s armed forces and spreading “deliberately false information” about them.
The charges stemmed from a YouTube debate he took part in with a Russian historian in January 2025, during which Mr Shlosberg called for an end to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
He later reposted the debate on a Russian social media platform, along with the front page of an edition of the Daily Mirror showing the Russian president beside an image of a blood-soaked Ukrainian woman.
Laws introduced by Russian authorities during the first week of the full-scale invasion have criminalised opposition to the war and extinguished what little remained of the country’s press freedom.
Courts have since used those laws to send hundreds of activists, including Mr Shlosberg, to prison for even limited criticism of what Mr Putin and his regime describe as the “special military operation”.
In June, another Yabloko deputy chairman, Maxim Kruglov, was sentenced to seven years for publishing “false information” about the Russian army. His alleged offence consisted of two Telegram posts from 2022 expressing sadness over deaths in Ukraine.
Thousands of Russian citizens have been detained or fined for opposing the war, particularly during the invasion’s first year.
Many others who reject the war have left the country and begun new lives in exile.
“In Russia, there is almost no opposition. It is almost entirely destroyed,” Elena Filina, a former Yabloko politician now living in Germany, told RTÉ News.
“Mouths are shut, people either sit on their opinions or are labelled with a dangerous status, such as a foreign agent,” she said.
Ms Filina is on a Russian federal wanted list and faces the same charge that authorities used to convict her party colleague, Mr Shlosberg.
She was arrested in Moscow on 24 February 2022, the day Russian forces invaded Ukraine, after protesting against the war. She received a five-day prison sentence.
Fearing that another anti-war demonstration could lead to a much longer sentence, Ms Filina decided to leave Russia.
After departing, she posted photographs of the Bucha massacre in Ukraine in April 2022. Russian authorities subsequently accused her of spreading “deliberately false information” about the country’s armed forces.
Those Yabloko members who remain in Russia, Ms Filina said, are “completely heroic people”.
Yabloko deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg, next to his wife Zhanna Shlosberg-Kozlovich, after hewas sentenced to 11 years in prison over his criticism of Russia’s war in Ukraine
By Russian standards, Yabloko is a liberal party. It is also a marginal one, attracting roughly 1% of the vote in each of the past few election cycles.
That was not always its position in Russian politics.
Yabloko won 45 seats in the 1995 federal parliamentary elections. During Mr Putin’s early years as president, however, it steadily slipped into the margins and lost its last four seats in the 2007 election.
The party still holds several seats in regional and city council assemblies in St Peterburg and Moscow. Its weak national support helps explain why Mr Putin’s political system tolerated it for so long.
Yabloko also served a purpose for the Kremlin, helping sustain the official claim that Russia’s political system allows genuine opposition.
An anti-war party with only marginal backing could even be presented as evidence that support for the Kremlin’s position on Ukraine remained overwhelming.
Previously, Ms Filina said, the authorities could point to Yabloko and declare: “Look, we have a party that is against us.”
But after Yabloko campaigned for peace and a ceasefire in Ukraine, recent polling suggested it could secure at least 3% of the vote.
That would still have fallen short of the 5% threshold parties must cross to win seats through the national party-list system.
Even so, a 3% result would have offered official evidence that an anti-war constituency existed among Russian voters — and that such support might grow.
Earlier this month, Medusa, the independent Russian news outlet based in Latvia, quoted a political strategist with Kremlin connections as saying authorities had initially allowed Yabloko to register so they could observe what happened once its campaign began.
The strategist said the party was struck from the ballot after its polling numbers rose, characterising the decision as “risk mitigation”.
Another consultant who works with Russia’s presidential administration told Meduza that Yabloko had become a “mouthpiece amplifying the signal of the opposition in exile”.
Young supporters of Yabloko gather outside Russia’s Supreme Court on 10 August
“Yabloko is a symbol of the anti-war position, and it shows us how many people support these ideas,” Andrei Pivovarov, an exiled Russian political activist living in Germany, told RTÉ News.
The party, he said, had begun to serve as a “point of consolidation” for different parts of Russian society opposed to the war.
Mr Pivovarov nevertheless questioned whether anything would have changed politically, even if Yabloko had been allowed to stand and won as much as 7% of the vote.
“Nothing changes because the Duma is absolutely controlled by Putin and his special forces,” he said, arguing that elections in today’s Russia have no meaningful connection to political change.
Those overseeing the electoral process can “draw any numbers in the final election”, Mr Pivovarov said.
In July 2022, he was sentenced to four years in a Russian penal colony for belonging to an “undesirable organisation”.
Mr Pivovarov had directed Open Russia, a pro-democracy movement that has since disbanded and was funded by exiled businessman and Kremlin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Mr Khodorkovsky spent 10 years in Russian prisons after challenging the Putin regime in the early 2000s.
Mr Pivovarov, now 44, was released in August 2024 as part of the largest prisoner exchange between Russia and Western intelligence agencies since the end of the Cold War.
Despite that experience, he remains hopeful that Russia can eventually undergo political change.
“We have a lot of groups and activists inside Russia, and it’s a new generation of people,” Mr Pivovarov said, noting that most activists from his own age group have now left the country.
Because Yabloko remains a legal party, he said, it has offered younger anti-war activists in their late teens and twenties a relatively safe space.
Vladimir Putin speaking at the United Russia party’s congress in Moscow on 22 August
Mr Putin’s United Russia party holds an overwhelming majority in the Duma, with at least 312 seats compared with 122 controlled by four opposition parties.
None of those four parties, however, represents a serious challenge to the Kremlin. Each operates within boundaries established by Mr Putin’s regime.
They are A Just Russia, which combines nationalism and socialism; the conservative New Russia; the Communist Party, or KPRF; and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, an ultranationalist organisation that is neither liberal nor democratic and works alongside United Russia.
On fundamental issues, including the war in Ukraine and political repression, these parties do not risk confronting Mr Putin’s party.
Some are, in fact, committed supporters of the war. They may occasionally criticise economic policy, but such dissent is limited and largely symbolic.
Russian political experts have described the arrangement as “managed opposition”.
Yabloko stood apart from that system, even without representation in the Duma.
“Yabloko was the only party within this constellation of managed opposition political parties, which openly promoted a message in favour of peace, although this message was very contradictory,” said Igor Gretskiy, a political analyst specialising in Russia and its foreign policy.
He cited the party’s support for a referendum on Crimea’s future constitutional status while also insisting that Ukraine’s territorial integrity be respected — positions he described as contradictory.
The Yabloko party did not respond to an interview request from RTÉ News for this article.
Mr Gretskiy said the case of Boris Nadezhdin, an opposition politician barred from the 2024 presidential election, and Yabloko’s exclusion this month suggested that the Kremlin no longer needed even this form of “managed opposition”.
“We’re at the point in which Russia is in the process of a totalitarian consolidation of its political system,” said Mr Gretskiy, a research fellow at the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn.
In his assessment, the war and Western sanctions have increased pressure on Russia’s economy, prompting the Kremlin to eliminate whatever domestic political risks remain.
Signage on a Moscow metro highlights the dates of the upcoming Duma election from 18 to 20 September
Russia’s parliamentary election, due to take place from 18 to 20 September, is unlikely to deliver surprises — much like the presidential vote two years earlier, when Mr Putin won 88% against a field of pliant candidates drawn from the managed opposition.
The outcome appears predetermined. United Russia is expected to secure a sweeping majority, with army veterans from the war in Ukraine included on its candidate list.
Under Russia’s mixed electoral system, combining single-seat constituencies with party-list seats, the managed opposition is likely to retain roughly the same combined representation, with the numbers shifting somewhat among the parties.
Still, some opposition activists do not regard Yabloko’s exclusion as an unqualified defeat.
Mr Pivovarov called the case a “small victory” for the opposition, even though voters had lost a “chance to vote for peace”.
“I think it’s a small step, and [in] my point of view, it’s not a win for [the] opposition, but it’s a loss for the Kremlin because they show his weakness,” he said. He added that the decision to ban a weak opposition party would be noticed by the Kremlin’s war elite and by officials in the FSB, Russia’s internal intelligence agency.
For 26 years, Mr Putin has portrayed himself as a powerful leader offering economic stability.
Instead, Russia’s war in Ukraine — which has reached Russian cities in recent months — has injected instability into the lives of many of its citizens.
Yabloko’s removal from the ballot suggests that the Kremlin is no longer willing to risk even a faint sign of dissent emerging through an election.
A modest deviation from the managed results would have formally acknowledged that opposition to the Kremlin’s war exists. It is a possibility Mr Putin and his regime appear determined to prevent.
