They should have pulled them out already.” Why Yabloko was barred from the State Duma elections

“They should have pulled them out already.” Why Yabloko was barred from the State Duma elections

Supreme Court judge Vyacheslav Kirillov, acting on a lawsuit from the Rodina party, removed Yabloko from the elections over copyright violations in campaign materials, according to the broadcast from the court hearing. According to Verstka, Yabloko’s electoral rating in the week before its removal rose “from the statistical margin of error” to 9.3%.

Verstka’s sources in the federal authorities said that the experiment of allowing an anti-war party to run “was rolled back” and “as quickly as possible.” A political strategist who works with the presidential administration says the effect of registering Yabloko’s list at the end of July turned out to be unexpected.

“Nothing was getting out of control, as you can see. But when a party like that [opposition and anti-war] gets a rating above 5%, and this happens a month and a half before the election, they have to be removed. And the sooner, the better. There’s no point in making things worse,” he explained.

According to two of Verstka’s sources familiar with the results of a fresh closed poll commissioned by one of the parliamentary parties, a week before its removal Yabloko already had the support of 9.3% of voters, after starting at the level of the statistical margin of error.

“But the final numbers would never have been anywhere close to that, and there was no talk whatsoever of a faction in the State Duma [that is, crossing the 5% vote threshold],” claims the head of a major NGO working with the Kremlin.

According to another Verstka source close to the Kremlin, despite the end of Yabloko’s 2026 election story, “someone [in the presidential administration] will still pay for this”. According to him, the whole Yabloko story, both its admission and the court case, looks like “a game against Kiriyenko.”

“[Russian Supreme Court judge Vyacheslav] Kirillov is a man of [head of the Presidential Administration’s domestic policy directorate Andrei] Yarin. Although formally he is on Kiriyenko’s team, it is known that he is an FSB protégé. Letting them in was supposed to be a game to lower tensions, not an accumulator of activity. And now a convenient argument has appeared: there are risks of protests, there are dissatisfied people, so something has to be changed,” he is convinced.

🟪The consideration of the lawsuit took almost 10 hours. In the end, in addition to the plaintiff, the Rodina party, representatives of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Central Election Commission also insisted in the courtroom on removing Yabloko from the elections. One of the main arguments of these two state bodies was Rosfinmonitoring data on foreign financing of the party’s campaign. According to Kirill Goncharov, the leader of Moscow Yabloko, this concerned several transfers from private individuals in Georgia and Armenia, which the party returned to the senders.

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