Meduza’s sources close to the Kremlin say Putin’s team registered an antiwar party as an experiment and shut it down, banning Yabloko from the ballot, when the polling came back
On July 29, Russia’s Central Election Commission registered the liberal party Yabloko for elections to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. On August 7, however, another party, Rodina, filed suit at Russia’s Supreme Court demanding that the decision be overturned. Rodina said Yabloko had repeatedly violated copyright in its campaign materials and on its website, and that it had concealed “foreign funding.” Rodina also claimed to detect “signs of extremism” in Yabloko’s slogan, “For Peace and Freedom!”
Yabloko’s representatives denied all the accusations, but on August 10 the Supreme Court struck the party’s candidate list from the Duma election.
What is the Rodina party?
Rodina, a far-right, populist, pro-Kremlin party, was founded in 2003. Its founders were:
- Dmitry Rogozin, the former head of the space agency Roscosmos, now a senator representing the occupied part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region and a member of the Federation Council’s Defense and Security Committee;
- Sergey Glazyev, state secretary of the Union State of Russia and Belarus;
- Sergey Baburin, a nationalist who opposed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and one of the chief ideologues of the “Russian Marches”;
- Yuri Skokov, the first person to serve as secretary of Russia’s Security Council, who died in 2013.
Rodina was dissolved in 2006 but revived in 2012, built around a civic group called the Congress of Russian Communities. Alexey Zhuravlyov became its chairman; at the time, he chaired the Congress of Russian Communities and belonged to the parliamentary faction of United Russia, the country’s ruling party.
In the outgoing State Duma, Zhuravlyov belonged to a different conservative faction, that of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), because Rodina had no seats in parliament.
Zhuravlyov is under sanctions from the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and several other countries over his support for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, he demanded that the singer Alla Pugacheva be designated a “foreign agent.”
In 2026, Rodina — which targets a patriotic audience — is running again.
Revoking the registration of the only party openly voicing an antiwar position sparked outrage among many Russians at home and abroad. Yet sources close to Russia’s Presidential Administration had told Meduza as early as fall 2025 that Yabloko was unlikely to be allowed to run in a federal election while campaigning under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom!”
The Presidential Administration’s political bloc, led by Sergey Kiriyenko, initially planned to run the Duma campaign on a “conservative scenario,” with a controlled field of participants. The 2024 presidential election went the same way: no representative of the liberal opposition took part — not even Yabloko co-founder Grigory Yavlinsky. A political strategist who works with the Presidential Administration said at the time that Yabloko could “generate risks”:
Yabloko has a position on issues that are sensitive to the authorities, above all the war. People are tired of it, and if the theme of peace is officially raised in [Yabloko’s] campaigning, it will inevitably attract voters.
A year ago, the political bloc was also worried that Yabloko could become a “rallying point” for moderate opposition figures who had stayed in Russia. The Presidential Administration considered “finding” procedural violations at the party’s candidate-nomination congress and using them as a pretext to deny it registration.
But officials changed course.
In July 2026, Yabloko was not only registered — though not without difficulty — but even given the second slot on the ballot. Sources close to the political bloc told Meduza that the decision reflected, first, a desire to please Vladimir Putin, who has some respect for “old” parties and their leaders. Second, it also mattered that so far, no party exempt from collecting signatures in a federal election has been denied registration.
The same political strategist said that registering Yabloko also let the political bloc see “what would happen if Yabloko launched a campaign.” The administration further assumed, he said, that an antiwar party could pull away the voters who back Russia’s Communist Party (KPRF) only as a protest.
“But [Yabloko’s] poll numbers went up, and the party was removed. You can call it fear, or you can call it risk mitigation. Even an extra 2 or 3% can wreck [United Russia’s] KPI and how the seats are divided at the end. If it’s predictable and if it can be prevented, anyone would do it,” the political strategist told Meduza.
And what happened once Yabloko launched its campaign?
In late July and early August, many videos supporting Yabloko appeared on TikTok and Instagram, racking up hundreds of thousands — even millions — of views. Engagement with these posts rose 4.5-fold over the previous two weeks, though it still trails that of United Russia and New People. In some videos, young Russians dance and lip-sync to “Yabloko” (“Apple”), a song by IOWA and Yolka; in others, they say or show who they plan to vote for in September.
Young supporters backed Yabloko not only on social media but also outside the Supreme Court building on August 10. According to figures from the party’s press service, about 500 people had gathered on Povarskaya Street in Moscow by the time the hearing began.
The same political strategist said that removing Yabloko through the courts, rather than by other means, was meant to “save face” for the Central Election Commission at the start of the campaign: the commission had registered the party, so it had no hand in barring it.
“Elections are run with the results adjusted anyway, and who knows what other decisions the commission will have to make as [campaigning] goes on. There’s no need for extra negativity aimed at the commission. As it is, the commission both registered [Yabloko] and even gave it the second slot on the ballot,” the source told Meduza.
He is convinced that “Yabloko’s fate could not have turned out any other way,” and not only because of the party’s rising poll numbers. “The subject of ending the war would have run through the whole campaign, and every poll shows public demand for it. Who needs that?” he said.
A political consultant who works with the Presidential Administration and with regional authorities told Meduza that Yabloko had turned into a “mouthpiece amplifying the signal of the opposition in exile.” “[The exiled opposition’s] voice started coming through the party. And a voice like that should not be heard,” he said.
Plans by Kiriyenko’s team to put New People in second place could also be “adjusted.” The reason is that internal polling shows the party’s numbers are higher in several regions than the Presidential Administration would like. A political strategist familiar with New People’s campaign put it this way:
In the Far East, Siberia, part of the Urals Federal District, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, support is well above the planned targets. So a decision was made internally to dial the party back — less TV time, for example, and not in prime time. On top of that, the party itself will now be more cautious, and in that case the KPRF could finish second.
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Andrey Pertsev