Authoritarian Crackdown: Russia's Supreme Court Silences Yabloko, the Last Anti-War Voice
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In a blatant act of political repression, Russia’s Supreme Court has removed the Yabloko party—the sole parliamentary opposition to the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine—from the September election, following a lawsuit orchestrated by a pro-government group.
Moscow – On Monday, the Russian Supreme Court delivered another blow to democracy by ordering the deregistration of Yabloko, the only party that dared to publicly oppose the Kremlin’s brutal military operation in Ukraine. This move strips the party from the September 18-20 parliamentary election ballot, following a lawsuit filed by the pro-Kremlin Motherland Party. The lawsuit’s accusations—copyright infringement, exceeding campaign-spending limits, and violating Russian law with an anti-war stance—are widely seen as pretexts to silence dissent and suppress the anti-war movement.
Yabloko’s co-founder and political committee chair Grigory Yavlinsky condemned the ruling and vowed to appeal, stating that barring the party is “a refusal to engage in dialogue with those who ask questions that make the authorities uncomfortable.” This decision is yet another example of the Kremlin’s intolerance for any challenge to its authoritarian rule.
Yabloko’s campaign, which bravely called for a cease-fire and an end to political repression, drew support from exiled opposition figures like Yulia Navalnaya, who described supporting Yabloko as “morally and politically right.” Yabloko chairman Nikolai Rybakov told the court that recent social-media videos featuring apples were created by ordinary citizens who “simply want to live in Russia and don’t want to get killed”—a sentiment the regime refuses to tolerate.
Kremlin-aligned parties wasted no time in piling on, with Sergei Mironov of A Just Russia urging the Prosecutor General’s Office to investigate Yabloko, and Gennady Zyuganov of the Communist Party denouncing Yabloko for not supporting President Vladimir Putin’s policies. Their attacks reveal the regime’s obsession with crushing even the mildest forms of dissent.
Analysts suggest that Yabloko’s initial inclusion on the ballot was a cynical attempt to provide a controlled outlet for dissent, but the party’s principled peace platform proved too threatening for the Kremlin’s calculations, triggering this latest act of legal repression.
Yabloko members have faced escalating persecution in recent years, including politically motivated criminal convictions and “foreign agent” designations for senior figures such as Maxim Kruglov, Lev Shlosberg, and Boris Vishnevsky. The silencing of Yabloko is yet another grim milestone in Russia’s descent into authoritarianism.