Russia barred antiwar politician Boris Nadezhdin from the 2024 presidential election. Now his former campaign workers face a fraud investigation.
Source: Slovo Zashchite
Russian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into several members of Boris Nadezhdin’s campaign staff on suspicion of large-scale fraud, the human rights project Slovo Zashchite said.
The investigation concerns transfers from Nadezhdin’s campaign account to accounts held by sole proprietors and individuals.
“In Russian elections, this is a common way to cover day-to-day expenses, but technically these transfers violate the law and can be grounds for prosecution,” Slovo Zashchite said.
The investigation may have stemmed from a rental agreement between Nadezhdin, his staff member Igor Artemyev, and Nikolai Kazakov, the owner of the office they rented during the election campaign. Moscow’s Perovsky District Court examined the agreement in 2025. Documents from Kazakov’s lawsuit indicate that the agreement was informal.
Nadezhdin, who left Russia for France, said he was unaware of the investigation. Slovo Zashchite did not name the campaign staff members under investigation.
At this stage, there is presumably an overarching criminal case, with separate cases to be spun off as “political expediency” dictates to prosecute specific activists who worked with Nadezhdin’s campaign and were involved in the financial arrangements described above.
Boris Nadezhdin planned to run in the 2024 presidential election and began collecting signatures in support of his candidacy. He was the only antiwar candidate. In many Russian regions, people lined up outside his campaign offices to add their signatures. Ultimately, the Central Election Commission barred Nadezhdin from running, refusing to register him as a candidate on the grounds that an unacceptably high percentage of the signatures he had collected were invalid.
In 2026, Nadezhdin planned to run for the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. But first, Russia’s Justice Ministry designated him a “foreign agent,” and then a court fined him for displaying “extremist symbols.” This barred him from running.
Nadezhdin left Russia in August.
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