The Russian Supreme Court has banned the country’s only true opposition party from standing in the Duma parliamentary elections. The ruling against Yabloko ensures that President Vladimir Putin’s governing United Russia party faces no risk of serious embarrassment come the Sept. 18 elections.
This decision wasn’t surprising, of course. Russian Supreme Court justices are utterly subordinated to the Kremlin, ruling as Putin wishes in order to maintain their lucrative financial and influence-gatekeeper privileges. But Yabloko’s fate does highlight Putin’s deepening intolerance for even mild dissent. Concerned by slowly but steadily declining public support for his war on Ukraine, Putin was unwilling to risk Yabloko acting as a magnet for protest votes against the war. Yabloko is the only national party to oppose the war, which has now lasted four-and-a-half years. All other national political parties are ultimately subservient to Putin’s wishes.
Still, Putin’s paranoia here is noteworthy. The notion that Yabloko represented any serious challenge to the former KGB officer’s authority is fanciful. On social issues, the party is well to the left of the Russian political mainstream and holds no seats in the Duma. Opinion polls suggest it has the support of around just 5% of voters. In contrast, United Russia retains the support of approximately 35% to 40% of voters. Putin’s fear, however, is that Russians might question his absolute authority. Russians have been frustrated by recent bans on the popular Telegram messaging app, cellphone internet blackouts, and fuel shortages. All of these issues flow from Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russia. But inflation is also rising, and with Ukraine now blitzing Wildberries, Russia’s equivalent of Amazon, goods shortages loom.
The situation further south isn’t any better. Russian forces remain generally fixed in place by Ukraine’s so-called “drone wall” strategy. Having suffered approximately 500,000 killed in action since the Feb. 2022 start of the war, Russian forces continue to pay extreme costs for minuscule territorial gains. Putin is desperate to distract from this intractable reality and the perception of incompetence it risks purveying.
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That desperation fed into the absurd arguments used to banish Yabloko. Brought not by United Russia (that would be too obvious) but by another nationalist party, Rodina, the lawsuit against Yabloko relied upon spurious allegations of Yabloko’s intellectual property theft. These included the ridiculous claim that the party had unjustly used an image from Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1965-1967 movie adaptations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace!
The Supreme Court also accepted that Yabloko had received foreign funding and was a source of illegal LGBT propaganda. And the court agreed that because combat continues in areas of southeastern Ukraine that Putin has (unjustly) claimed as Russian territory, Yabloko’s calls for a ceasefire were seditious. No matter that the Russian election commission had previously approved Yabloko’s right to stand in the elections, Putin gets what Putin wants.
At least for the moment, then, the threat of anti-war voter embarrassment has been eliminated. But as this war drags on and Russians continue to suffer more for it, Putin’s political vulnerability will only grow.