A Russian court disqualifies a sitting Communist deputy over the copyright to Microsoft fonts in his campaign ads

The Samara Regional Court has stripped Mikhail Matveyev, an incumbent deputy from Russia’s Communist Party (KPRF), of his registration as a candidate for the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament.

The lawsuit was filed by Anna Sarantseva, a Party of Pensioners candidate running against Matveyev in the single-mandate district. She said his campaign materials used photographs — including some of his own — without permission from the copyright holders. They also used Microsoft fonts whose licenses the company restricted in Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The regional election commission backed the lawsuit, and Matveyev plans to appeal the ruling.

Matveyev is considered one of the KPRF’s strongest single-mandate candidates. He won the Krasnoglinsky district in 2021, and ahead of the current campaign, he and Komi deputy Oleg Mikhailov received the most votes among 230 participants in the party’s internal “People’s Candidate KPRF” project, political analyst Konstantin Kalachev said. “Though some might see letting him win the same district twice in a row as overkill,’” Kalachev told the Russian business daily Kommersant in May.

Meduza sources reported in June that the KPRF planned to avoid nominating candidates who had defeated United Russia rivals in 2021. The tactic would hand United Russia a supermajority in the Duma large enough to amend the constitution unilaterally and to push through any measure on the votes of its own faction alone.

In the end, the KPRF itself declined to nominate two strong single-mandate candidates. In Altai Krai, the party replaced Maria Prusakova with Lyudmila Klyushnikova, who has been under criminal investigation for fraud on an especially large scale since November 2025. In Yakutia, the party chose not to nominate Pyotr Ammosov at its congress.

A source told Meduza that similar copyright complaints have begun surfacing against Oleg Mikhailov.

Copyright claims have also been used during the current campaign to remove opposition candidates from other parties. On August 12, Russia’s Supreme Court revoked the registration of Yabloko’s federal list after a lawsuit from the Rodina Party. The court cited several violations, including unauthorized use of the lyrics to Pust vsegda budet solntse (“May There Always Be Sunshine”) and Lish by ne bylo voiny (“As Long As There’s No War”), survey data from the Levada Center, and an image generated by ChatGPT.