A rival party sued and Russia's Supreme Court struck Yabloko's list, not its district candidates

Russia's Supreme Court cancelled the registration of Yabloko's federal candidate list on 10 August 2026, five weeks before the State Duma election of 18 to 20 September. The court acted on a lawsuit brought not by the state but by Rodina, a nationalist party contesting the same ballot.

Yabloko is the only party on the ballot campaigning openly for a swift end to the war in Ukraine. Its convention, which ran almost twenty hours from 10am on 27 June to 6am on 28 June, adopted a pre election programme and approved 412 candidates: 275 on the federal list, of whom 7 sat in the nationwide section and 268 across 71 regional groups, and 137 nominated in single member districts. The Central Election Commission registered the federal list at the end of July, a decision The Moscow Times described as unexpected. On 5 August the commission drew ballot positions, party representatives pulling numbered balls from a lottery machine, and Yabloko drew second place, directly beneath United Russia. Eleven parties took part.

The grounds the court accepted were mostly not about the war. According to the Yekaterinburg outlet 66.ru, Rodina's complaint covered unauthorised use of a phrase from Alexander Volodin's play "Five Evenings", photographs and other material used without permission, about 88 million roubles allegedly spent on internet campaigning outside the official electoral fund, and foreign financing traced by Russia's Federal Financial Monitoring Service, of which 2.8 million roubles was said to have reached individuals and only 16,900 roubles the party itself. The Moscow Times reported that the copyright allegations extended to song lyrics, film footage "and even images generated by ChatGPT". Meduza reported that a Central Election Commission representative introduced the financial monitoring evidence, and that Yabloko replied this was an artefact of legally mandated divestment of foreign shareholdings before an election. An extremism allegation was also made. 66.ru reports it could not be proven, and that the foreign financing was the decisive ground.

Party chairman Nikolai Rybakov rejected the funding claim: "We're being funded by Russian citizens, and we answer to Russian citizens, as well as the Central Election Commission." He said the party would appeal within the five day deadline. Co-founder Grigory Yavlinsky wrote on his Telegram channel that "we do not agree with the decision made and will appeal it". Supporters gathered outside the court and chanted "Shame". The Moscow Times reported officers moving to clear them, one telling the crowd they had two minutes to leave.

The mechanism matters more than the outcome. Cancelling a federal list removes a party from the nationwide proportional half of the ballot, where half the Duma's 450 seats are allocated. It does not, 66.ru reports, cancel the registration of that party's candidates in single member districts or in concurrent regional contests, and the party said it would concentrate on the candidates who can still stand. Yabloko nominated 137 district candidates in June. How many of those registrations survive, and in how many of Russia's districts a voter will actually find a Yabloko name on the paper, has not been reported, and is the single most consequential unreported number in this story.

The party arrived at August already heavily depleted. Amnesty International reported in December 2025 that at least five regional Yabloko leaders and members had faced prosecution, that around fifty administrative cases had been brought against members across Russia's regions, and that eleven members had been designated foreign agents, a status that removes the right to stand for election. In its June 2026 statement Amnesty put the figure at twelve officials designated as foreign agents and at least nine activists facing criminal prosecution. Rybakov himself was fined 1,500 roubles on 4 December 2025 for sharing extremist symbols, the symbol being a photograph of the dead opposition figure Aleksei Navalny, and was barred from standing in September 2026. Deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg was convicted on 5 November 2025 of breaching foreign agent obligations and given 420 hours of community service, and faced a third criminal case opened on 5 December 2025. Maksim Kruglov was sentenced on 24 June 2026 by a Moscow district court to seven years in prison for spreading deliberately false information about the armed forces, over social media posts describing civilian deaths in Mariupol and Bucha.

Amnesty's Marie Struthers said of the authorities that "it is clear they want to purge the political landscape of any groups which are not under the Kremlin's control and do not share its agenda, including its ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine", and called the prosecutions "a deliberate effort to silence the last organized political force in Russia that consistently calls for peace and speaks out against human rights violations".

What is not known is whether the appeal will be heard on its merits, whether the district candidacies will be picked off individually in the weeks before polling, and whether Rodina, which brought the case, gains anything measurable from having done so.