Update: On the evening of August 10, Russia’s Supreme Court removed Yabloko from the ballot for the State Duma, the lower house of the country’s parliament, ruling in favor of a suit filed by the Rodina party.What’s happening with Yabloko ahead of the election?Yabloko last cleared the threshold for the State Duma in 1999, when it won 5.93 percent of the vote — above the 5 percent required for representation. In every parliamentary election since, opposition politicians — from the Communist Party to Yabloko’s own members — and independent observers have documented serious fraud.In the 2011 election, Yabloko won 3.43 percent of the vote, enough to clear the threshold for federal funding. Party co-founder Grigory Yavlinsky ran for president in 2018 but took just 1.05 percent. In the 2021 parliamentary election, the party won 1.34 percent of the vote, according to Russia’s Central Election Commission, and lost its state funding as a result. In 2024, Yabloko did not field a presidential candidate at all.Yabloko still has strong regional branches, with caucuses in the legislatures of St. Petersburg, the Pskov region, and Karelia. Those branches earn it an exemption from collecting signatures to run for the State Duma: Since 2012, the exemption has applied to any party that has won list seats in at least one regional parliament.The party’s ranks have included several politicians who are well known and popular in their home regions, among them Boris Vishnevsky in St. Petersburg, Lev Shlosberg in the Pskov region, and Maxim Kruglov in Moscow. Shortly before the coming State Duma and local elections, the authorities began labeling prominent Yabloko members “foreign agents,” a designation that bars them from running for office; Russian officials apply it to critics they accuse of taking foreign support. Shlosberg has also been added to the register of “terrorists and extremists,” and he is being held in a pretrial detention center on charges of spreading “false information” about the army. Kruglov was sentenced in June to seven years in prison on the same charge.Prominent Yabloko members at the federal and regional levels, including party chairman Nikolai Rybakov, have also been found guilty in administrative cases of displaying ”” — and, like those labeled “foreign agents,” they can no longer run for office.In 2025, sources close to Russia’s presidential administration told Meduza they doubted that the party, campaigning under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom!,” would make the final ballot. At the time, those sources assumed that any refusal to register Yabloko would be pinned on some violation in the candidate nomination process.In the end, Yabloko was barred from the St. Petersburg legislative assembly election, and its registration in Karelia was revoked, after Rodina — a far-right populist party led by lawmaker Alexei Zhuravlev — sued. Rodina first accused Yabloko of failing to submit the required documents to the election commission; several days later, after the Central Election Commission had registered Yabloko’s State Duma list, Rodina demanded that the party be struck from the ballot. Rodina claims that Yabloko violated and and that it receives foreign funding. Yabloko called the accusations unfounded and politically motivated.Rodina is not alone: Other establishment parliamentary parties have piled on. Leonid Slutsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), called for Yabloko to be declared an “undesirable organization.”A political strategist who works with the presidential administration denied that the administration’s political bloc ordered the campaign against Yabloko:[The head of New People, Alexei] Nechaev, [Communist Party leader Gennady] Zyuganov, Slutsky, and [the head of A Just Russia, Sergei] Mironov, along with Zhuravlev of Rodina, can all tell for themselves which way the wind is blowing right now. What’s more, all of them — except Nechaev — are pitching their campaigns to an ultra-patriotic electorate that eats up criticism of Yabloko. Rodina is being used so that, if the situation suddenly changes, Yabloko can be given a chance to contest the suit. Even so, they could strike [Yabloko] right now.Why was Yabloko registered at all?Refusing to register Yabloko’s list from the outset would have been a “violation of the unwritten rules,” another political strategist, who worked with the leadership of the presidential administration’s political bloc, told Meduza:They [Yabloko] have an exemption from collecting signatures — for some reason everyone forgets that. You can nitpick procedural questions [for example, an improperly conducted party congress or errors in paperwork — Meduza], but sometimes there’s nothing to latch onto. Striking them later over some violation, though — to the administrators, that looks more lawful.The strategist said Russia has an “extensive practice” of removing candidates after they have been registered: ”[Grounds for removal can include] the use of images or music in alleged violation of copyright, or some financial irregularity.”The independent Russian outlet Verstka reported on August 7, citing its own sources, that Yabloko may have been registered to keep the New People party from finishing second. New People was created in 2020 with the involvement of the administration’s political bloc, and the project is overseen by Sergei Kiriyenko, the administration’s first deputy head. Verstka’s sources said security officials, who have a tense relationship with Kiriyenko, want Yabloko on the ballot and New People’s vote held down.“Nobody wants Kiriyenko to have his own large faction in the State Duma. If things get turbulent, nobody needs that — the Duma is elected for five years. And who knows what could happen,” one of Verstka’s sources said. A source in the Moscow mayor’s office and a media strategist who works with the authorities confirmed this account to Meduza. The mayor’s office source called the security officials’ interest in Yabloko’s success — and Kiriyenko’s failure — “quite understandable.”Two political strategists who work with the administration, along with a source close to it, told Meduza that the political bloc does want New People to finish second, and that the party itself “has that directive.””[Nobody’s ready] to bust their ass over it — it all depends on the situation. But the desire [to get New People into second place] is there. The security officials and the leadership of the presidential administration’s don’t share it — they want the Communist Party to come second, the way it always has,” one of the strategists said. Meduza asked a source in the Communist Party about the prospect of the communists finishing second. He called it “possible, given a favorable combination of circumstances.”Yabloko’s place on the ballot was meant from the start to pull votes away from the Communist Party, not from New People, said a source in one of the presidential envoys’ offices, where the local political bloc is loyal to Kiriyenko:The Communist Party has long collected the votes of so-called fellow travelers — people who don’t generally support the party but vote for it out of a desire to spite the authorities. Not even the party’s pronounced Stalinism, which the urban intelligentsia naturally doesn’t share, gets in the way. The Communist Party may be for the war while part of its electorate is against it, but protest votes still tend to go to the communists.A clearly anti-war party on the ballot would “distract” those fellow travelers from the Communist Party, the source said. Party members spoke out about the war on August 10 in the Supreme Court, among other venues. Rybakov listed “preserving human life” and moving “the world back from the dangerous brink of unleashing a nuclear war” among Yabloko’s most important goals. He also said that the sooner a “peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine” comes, the better. Irina Kopkina, the deputy head of Yabloko’s Moscow branch, thanked the high school and university students who had come to the courthouse to support the party and ended her speech with the words: “For Peace and Freedom!”But Yabloko would not have been registered without Vladimir Putin’s approval, a source close to the presidential administration told Meduza. “Everything serious in a federal election — the makeup of the ballot, the turnout targets, the targets for United Russia — is approved by the head of state,” he said.According to this source, the president holds a “conservative position toward the ‘old’ parties and their leaders”:The position is this: The old hands of Russian elections should be on the ballot. What’s more, [Grigory] Yavlinsky has direct contact with the president. They could have agreed on it personally — his party’s participation matters to Yavlinsky, and he has already met [the Kremlin] halfway; in 2024, the presidential election passed without any anti-war overtones.A Meduza source inside Yabloko denied that Putin and Yavlinsky have any personal arrangement but hinted that people from Yabloko discussed the party’s participation in the election with government officials.How much support does Yabloko have now?In late July and early August, TikTok and Instagram filled with videos supporting Yabloko, drawing hundreds of thousands and even millions of views. Engagement with these posts has risen 4.5-fold over the past two weeks, though it still trails engagement for United Russia and New People. In some clips, 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 turned out for Yabloko offline as well, gathering outside the Supreme Court on August 10: About 500 people had assembled on Povarskaya Street in Moscow by the start of the hearing, according to the party’s press service.Private polling seen by Meduza’s sources offers another read on Yabloko’s popularity. A political strategist who works with the administration’s political bloc put the party’s overall rating at 6 percent and said support for the anti-war party in Moscow and St. Petersburg is “even higher”:Qualitative research shows that the people ready to back Yabloko are the ones who have always opposed the war — not people who have grown tired of it, but people who never supported it in the first place. That voter accounts for 12 to 14 percent of the electorate. If those voters turn out reliably, their share of the overall turnout will be higher still. That’s why Yabloko on the ballot became a problem. And that’s why removal is very likely — nobody [at the presidential administration] is eyeballing a sixth faction in the State Duma.A publicly released poll by the independent pollster Russian Field put Yabloko at 5.3 percent in the capital in July. The Telegram channel Faridaily cited a private survey by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) that gave the party 5.5 percent nationwide and 11 percent in Moscow.“We go by the weekly polls from the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), which for two years now has put Yabloko at 3 percent among all respondents and 4 percent among those who have made up their minds. Broken down by federal district, we’re at 7 to 8 percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Eighteen percent say they would consider voting for the party — the highest figure in 15 years, and it’s growing,” a source inside Yabloko told Faridaily.The newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, citing research by an unnamed polling center, reported that Yabloko’s rating stood at 9.38 percent at the end of July, without specifying whether the figure was national or regional. Two political strategists who work with the administration think it is regional. “It could be data for Moscow or St. Petersburg. Or it could be among all respondents, not just the ones certain to show up at the polls,” one of them said.In VTsIOM’s latest ranking, which covers only the parliamentary parties, the Communist Party ranks second behind United Russia: With the support of 10.4 percent of respondents, the communists have edged past the LDPR, at 10 percent. New People, at 8.6 percent, now sits in fourth place.As recently as mid-June, VTsIOM had the Communist Party third with 10.7 percent and New People second with 12 percent. FOM’s figures currently put the Communist Party at 9 percent and New People at 8 percent; in that survey, the LDPR is second with 10 percent, and United Russia, of course, tops the list.As Rybakov put it in court on August 10:The people who support us don’t want to be killed.At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.
