Yabloko is off the ballot. Here’s how Russia’s exiled opposition, its political analysts, and its pro-war bloggers explain the decision.

On August 10, Russia’s Supreme Court removed Yabloko — the only party campaigning on an antiwar platform — from the upcoming State Duma election. The formal pretext was a lawsuit from the Rodina party, which accused Yabloko of a string of absurd copyright violations. Meduza collected reactions from across the political spectrum: Yabloko’s own leadership, exiled opposition figures who had urged voters to back the party, and pro-Kremlin bloggers. We’ve shortened some quotes for readability but kept their overall meaning.

Grigory Yavlinsky, founder of Yabloko

We have a very simple, short, and absolutely clear platform [under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom!”]. That is precisely why people with very different views are starting to support it. When a party with exactly this platform is removed from the ballot without real grounds, the political system is exposing itself. This decision says more about the importance of our platform than any official election results.

Yulia Navalnaya, leader of the Anti-Corruption Foundation

We are fighting Putin and his criminal regime with every tool available to us. Voting for Yabloko could have been one of those tools. Now it’s gone. But has our opponent changed? Has our goal? No. So we’ll find a new tool. Keep campaigning against United Russia. Turn out to vote. In single-mandate districts, follow Smart Voting’s recommendations; on the party-list ballot, vote for any party other than United Russia.

Ilya Yashin, leader of Peaceful Russia, an opposition party founded in exile

Yabloko’s removal showed how many people there are who oppose the war and the dictatorship — and the Kremlin won’t be able to hide that, even by falsifying the results. So what do we do now? Vote, no matter what. Our task now is to push United Russia’s result as low as possible. A low result for United Russia will be the expression of our protest — yours and mine.

Obviously, voting for any of the parties left on the ballot is repellent. But protest voting is never pleasant. Sometimes you have to hold your nose and vote. And everyone has to vote at the same time: exactly at noon on September 20. That way, lines of war opponents will form all across the country. That way, everyone will see for themselves how many of us there really are.

Andrei Pivovarov, a member of the Anti-War Committee of Russia

What’s left now? First, Yabloko still has candidates in the single-mandate districts. We should absolutely support them. As for the other candidates, I’m not drawn to the strategy of backing anyone at all who’s running against a United Russia candidate. […] A Yabloko candidate, absolutely. And, of course, Noon [Against] Putin: showing up at the polling stations and demonstrating that huge numbers of people in this country disagree.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, opposition politician

Boris Nemtsov often said that in a country with no free elections, no independent media, and no honest polling, the only way to gauge public sentiment objectively is by how the authorities react. Today’s decision by the Kremlin to remove Yabloko from the September “elections” to the State Duma [the lower house of Russia’s parliament] is the most accurate measurement of Russian public opinion anyone could imagine.

Tatiana Stanovaya, political analyst

Yabloko has been taken off the ballot, and that was predictable. It isn’t that the Kremlin changed its mind and is correcting its own mistake. It’s about the support Yabloko got from the opposition that has been forced out of the country… [The Kremlin] could presumably have calculated this scenario in advance, but apparently it still didn’t expect it. The risk was quite high that the campaign would turn into a fight for and against peace — that is, into an argument about the war — and that clearly wasn’t part of the plan.

Alexander Kynev, political analyst

The lawsuit was badly put together. But the public-relations bravado, the pickets, and so on from the democratic opposition around the lawsuit left Yabloko no chance of winning anyway, because under those circumstances a win would have been a moral victory and a colossal PR success [for the opposition]. As a result, the radical patriots imposed their agenda on the authorities, who by then had no other way to act in court. In the end, the radical democrats, through their excessive, showily demonstrative publicity campaign around Yabloko, first provoked the lawsuit and then the court’s ruling.

Vitalik Buterin, creator of the Ethereum blockchain

Yabloko, the only political party in Russia that openly opposed the war, has just been barred from taking part in the election. Boris Nadezhdin recently had to leave for France. It looks like the authorities are eliminating the last remnants of the political opposition ahead of the parliamentary election.

Anitta Hipper, the European Commission’s lead spokesperson for foreign affairs and security policy

This basically shows that Russia is afraid, because they truly need to eliminate any dissenting voice. So by silencing the political opposition, the Kremlin is also removing any domestic voice that has been critical of its unjustified war of aggression against Ukraine. I would say this comes as a surprise, but it’s not.

Dmitry Kolezev, journalist

So what actually happened with Yabloko? What explains this inconsistency from the Kremlin — first registering the party, then quickly canceling the registration? The main reason, of course, is the public campaign in support of Yabloko, much of it spontaneous, and the fact that many opposition figures who had emigrated backed the party.

But I think it goes deeper than that. The Kremlin hoped to use Yabloko to show that antiwar ideas have little support in Russia — and it was turning out exactly the opposite. This was a miscalculation of concept, not of campaign technique. It isn’t that Yabloko turned out to be more popular than expected — and it’s worse than that for the Kremlin: antiwar sentiment is far broader than anyone in power had imagined.

Ksenia Sobchak, journalist

A lot of people are puzzled — why remove Yabloko at all? It’s true: Yavlinsky is entirely part of the system; Putin seems to be fine with him; [Yabloko] always gets very few votes anyway. So why remove them?

It all seems perfectly clear to me. The system isn’t against liberalism: if you want a pinch of it, by all means, go to New People. What the system won’t accept is [Yabloko leader Nikolai] Rybakov (we say Rybakov, but the name we mean is Yavlinsky) or Nadezhdin running specifically as antiwar candidates. So if you support the ”special military operation,” as New People does, the rest of your liberalism doesn’t matter much. But candidates who don’t back the ”special military operation” can’t be allowed on the ballot. What if people start voting for a candidate like that en masse?

Konstantin Sonin, economist

In Russia, Putin banned one remaining opposition party. It has not passed the 5 percent threshold in the last 20 years; it was forced to purge all its recognizable leaders, it has been loyal in all respects but one — it promised to campaign “for peace.” And Putin, who has falsified election results for two decades — and will certainly do it again — banned the party. Just because to have “for peace” as a campaign slogan is so damaging. […] With all opposition leaders killed, jailed, or exiled, he still fears the word “peace.”

Kirill Martynov, editor in chief of Novaya Gazeta Europe

Yabloko chairman Nikolai Rybakov, addressing a judge who spent the hearing dangling from a telephone cord [to the security services], said his voters simply don’t want to die. Yabloko’s isolation and the atrocities planned for the fall are unlikely to turn most Russians into active supporters of the war. That means Putin’s campaign against people who want to live will remain a source of political tension. Everyone knows antiwar sentiment exists, but noticing it — and trying to represent it legally — is forbidden.

Outside the Supreme Court building, people ate apples and sang about how “the night will pass, and a clear morning will come.” As for the “clear” part, there are doubts.

Zapiski Veterana (A Veteran’s Notes), a pro-war Telegram channel

They decided to play it safe. The party of soy boys, the storm troopers of Verkhny Lars, pseudo-liberal slime — Yabloko, which wanted to hand Crimea and the Donbas back to Ukraine and pay the Ukes an indemnity — has been removed from the State Duma election. You can already hear the howling from the swamps.

Anastasia Kashevarova, a Russian propagandist

There are no winners in this fight with Yabloko. Understand this: Yabloko’s removal has nothing to do with political competition. It’s an attempt to rock the boat on the government’s legitimacy. This is how the West operates during color revolutions: don’t let them run, and the election is illegitimate from the start; let them run, and they’ll pump out stories about ballot stuffing and vote-rigging, since Yabloko representatives could have been at every polling station.

And when any decision produces a situation in which the country will be rocked and destabilized either way, then it’s not the enemy who has to answer for it — it’s us. Which means there’s something here to rock.

Sabotage Assault Reconnaissance Group “Rusich,” an anti-Ukraine neo-Nazi paramilitary group

Rotten Yabloko has been removed from the election. It looks like the liberals’ last hope of making themselves heard at all ended before it began. Our country shouldn’t have parties that oppose the war — parties that Russophobic, anti-Russian scum can rally around.

Of course, with its antiwar stance, Yabloko could have spoiled the picture of the election fairly badly — obviously the results would have been painted in whatever way was needed regardless — but banning even the possibility of expressing an antiwar position was already the right call.

.