Nobody expected the September elections to be fair. That was never the question. The question was whether the state would keep up the forms of fairness long enough to be worth pretending about, and on Monday the Supreme Court answered: no.
The court barred Yabloko from the parliamentary ballot, striking the only registered party that opposes the war. The lawsuit was filed by Rodina, a nationalist party loyal to the Kremlin. The hearing lasted eight hours; the decision took moments. The party will not appear on the ballot when Russia votes on September 18-20 in its first parliamentary election since the war began.
The grounds were the usual ones, and their thinness was the point. Rodina accused Yabloko of supporting an extremist organization for publishing material sympathetic to the international LGBT movement, which the Supreme Court itself designated extremist in 2023. It cited a party member who had recited the old Soviet refrain about sunshine during an interview, calling that a copyright violation. And it alleged, through Russia’s financial monitoring service, that the party had received money routed from Germany and the United States. None of this was about the war, which is the one subject that could actually move Russian votes. That is how the system works: the accusation is trivial, the consequence is total.
The timing told the real story. The Central Electoral Commission approved Yabloko’s candidate list in late July. The Kremlin’s original calculation, evident for months, was to let the anti-war party run and lose, the way it has lost every national vote for more than two decades, taking 1.34 percent in 2021, and to display that defeat as proof of tolerance. Then the calculation changed. United Russia has fallen to about a third in the polls amid inflation, power cuts and drone attacks, while Yabloko’s support was climbing; a ballot containing a real anti-war choice had begun to look like a liability rather than a decoration. The ban is the Kremlin’s way of admitting that its own stagecraft had become dangerous. You ban what you fear.
The day’s real politics happened outside the courthouse, where hundreds of mostly young Russians gathered for the hearing, chanting the party’s name, carrying apples, the party’s symbol, and shouting shame when the verdict came. A chalk message on the pavement read in support of Yabloko and freedom. In a country where public protest has been criminalized, a court hearing remains one of the few legal places to gather, and the state, by staging this one, handed its opponents a stage.
The cost of opposing the war has been rising all year. Maxim Kruglov, Yabloko’s deputy leader, was sentenced in June to seven years in prison over online posts describing civilian casualties in Ukraine. Party chairman Nikolai Rybakov was fined 1,500 rubles in December for a post mourning Alexei Navalny, and the fine carried a one-year bar from elections. Two deputy chairmen and other candidates had already been excluded from the ballot. Last week the party’s website was hit by a cyberattack days after it opened a fundraising appeal. The Supreme Court ruling was the last cut, and it was made at the top of the tree.
Rybakov said the party would file an appeal inside the five-day window and keep trying, by every available means, to get on the ballot. The appeal will be heard by the same institution that just ruled against him. The remaining ten parties on the ballot all support the war or decline to criticize it, and independent monitors have been stripped of most of their ability to check the count. Fewer voters are likely to show up, an outcome that serves the Kremlin, which no longer needs an anti-war party to prove its tolerance, only an empty ballot to prove its control.
The French coverage of the ruling put it plainly: the court has deprived voters opposed to the war of the only way to register that opposition at the ballot box. Nobody expected fair elections in Russia. What changed on Monday is that the state stopped pretending they could be. The apple is off the ballot, and with it the last pretense that the vote was ever a choice.