The liberal Yabloko, whose slogan is “For peace and freedom,” is the only domestic party that opposes Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The fact that the party was initially given the green light to appear on the ballot can be explained by the Putin regime's expectation that it would receive very few votes. A strategy that backfired, according to political analyst Andrei Kolesnikov.
"They were forced to roll back a plan that turned out to be unsuccessful," Kolesnikov writes in the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe.
Did Putin scare you?
According to Kolesnikov, the regime realized, among other things, that a vote for Yabloko in the September elections - where no real challengers are allowed to stand - could have become a public manifestation for peace.
“It is an official admission of weakness confirmed by a court decision,” writes Kolesnikov, who lives in Russia and has been labeled a foreign agent.
The exiled Russian opposition politician Leonid Volkov, a close ally of the late Alexei Navalny, is of the same view.
"There was a clear way to show their protest against Putin and the war. It was embodied by the Yabloko party on the ballot. This scared Putin," Volkov writes on Facebook.
Young people with apples
Yabloko's participation in the parliamentary elections had been appealed by a pro-Kremlin nationalist party. About a hundred supporters of the war-critical party, mainly young people, gathered on Monday outside the Moscow courthouse where the decision was made. Several of them carried the party's symbol, a green apple.
Previously, videos in support of Yabloko had appeared on TikTok and Instagram. Some of them had received millions of views, according to the exiled Russian news site Meduza.
Support for Yabloko among the Russian population is between three and six percent, Meduza writes, citing various estimates. Support is estimated to be higher in large cities.
According to opposition former MP Dmitry Gudkov, the regime did not primarily fear that Yabloko would receive many votes - but that the election campaign would turn into an anti-war campaign.
There would have been hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country handing out flyers, he told Radio Liberty.
Corrected: In an earlier version, there was a statement that Kolesnikov works at a think tank in Moscow, but their office has been closed.
