The Masks Are Off. The Kremlin No Longer Even Wants to Pretend It Is Playing Democracy

The last systemic party that at least formally continued to display liberal values and speak about peace has been removed from the elections. To be precise, the Supreme Court removed Yabloko’s federal party list from the State Duma elections, depriving the party of the opportunity to compete for the 225 seats distributed through party lists. Yabloko candidates running in single-member districts were not automatically removed.

On August 10, 2026, the Supreme Court granted a lawsuit filed by the Rodina party, with the Prosecutor General’s Office supporting the demand. On August 17, the appellate panel upheld the ruling. Yabloko said it intended to appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Court.

But the reasons are particularly revealing.

Formally, Yabloko was not removed for saying, “We want peace.” The court used an entire set of legal grounds. Yet once you look at what those grounds actually consist of, the proceedings begin to resemble not a court case but a badly written piece of political satire.

Among the violations identified by the court was the use of the words “May there always be sunshine” from a kind children’s song with lyrics by Lev Oshanin. There was also the phrase “if only there were no war,” which the court linked to Alexander Volodin’s play Five Evenings. Frames from Sergei Bondarchuk’s film War and Peace also became part of the complaint.

And here the so-called court is playing with fire. Generations of Russians grew up with these songs and films. By turning familiar images of peace and humanity into grounds for political accusations, the authorities are breaking people’s picture of the world — and, if properly brought to public attention, this could touch even the most hardened “patriots.”

But then things become almost grotesque: the complaints also included Levada Center polling results and even an image of trains created using ChatGPT.

A picture generated by artificial intelligence became one of the elements in a judicial decision removing a political party’s federal list. The court referred to the absence of permission from the copyright holder, which the ruling identified as OpenAI.

This is where the logic of such “justice” becomes especially clear: a right gradually ceases to be a right and becomes merely a temporary opportunity that the state allows a person to use until a court decides otherwise. Permission begins to be demanded even where a person should originally be free to act.

Then the same logic appears in relation to money.

Rosfinmonitoring reported that several Russian citizens who donated money to Yabloko had themselves previously received funds from the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, the UAE and other countries. Yet there was no direct foreign transfer to the party. According to Yabloko chairman Nikolai Rybakov, the disputed donations amounted to just 16,900 rubles, transferred by Russian citizens, while the party saw no evidence in the case materials that these particular funds were of foreign origin.

It is almost alchemy:

a person receives some money from abroad → it sits in the same account as their own money → later they donate several thousand rubles to a Russian political party → and suddenly that money begins to smell foreign.

Money seems to become politically contaminated simply by having shared an account with a foreign transfer.

This logic already reeks of absolute isolationism in the style of North Korea: a little further, and a conversation with a foreigner itself could be described as “links with foreign structures,” while ordinary international contact could become a prerequisite for accusations of espionage. The state begins to see a threat not in a specific unlawful act, but in the mere fact that a person has come into contact with the outside world.

The result is an almost complete portrait of a new state aesthetic: a children’s song about sunshine is suspicious, “if only there were no war” is a problem, a Soviet film about war is a problem, Western artificial intelligence is a problem too, and money becomes politically unreliable simply because at some point it happened to sit next to foreign funds.

As if the very idea of peace, freedom and an open world were so toxic that it could infect this “beautiful” world of war and violence.

There is another detail that helps explain the political context of the entire story.

Rodina, which filed the lawsuit against Yabloko, tried to use against the party its demand for a ceasefire and negotiations over Ukraine, its previous statements against the persecution of LGBT people, and other political positions.

Yabloko entered the elections under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom!”, called for a ceasefire and negotiations, and opposed political repression. At the same time, the party seeking to remove it from the elections attempted to portray these positions as something close to extremism.

Formally, the case is about copyright, financing and campaign materials.

In reality, we are looking at a political system in which even the word “peace” itself has become a red flag and a pretext for repression.

But the background matters even more.

Yabloko has always occupied a particular place in the Russian political system: a largely formal player with a liberal orientation. It was tolerated partly because the Kremlin found it useful to have at least one legal and relatively manageable structure that could simulate the presence of liberal politics.

Genuinely independent liberal forces were gradually either barred from elections, administratively destroyed or pushed out of the country.

Now, apparently, even this decoration is no longer considered necessary.

The liberal shop window is no longer needed.

And this is where the central question about Russian justice emerges.

Electoral law can be formalistic and harsh. Even a minor violation can sometimes have serious consequences. But in that case, the law must work equally for everyone.

If a children’s song, a frame from a film, a ChatGPT image and 16,900 rubles turn into fatal violations precisely when the target is a party with an anti-war platform, then the word “court” begins to sound far too serious.

Sometimes what is happening is better described not as a court but as an itch — an obsessive urge to find another violation where an ordinary person would see none.

On August 17, dozens of people who came to support Yabloko near the Supreme Court were detained. Most were released, but the story did not end there: police later began visiting some of them at home, summoning them to police stations and opening administrative cases.

If this practice continues, it may turn into a kind of carousel of detentions and administrative repression against people whose only “offence” is the desire to publicly support a political alternative.

Reality is becoming brutally simple: even a faint reminder that the world can be humane and peaceful is being pushed out of public life as something suspicious and dangerous.

And this raises the main question.

What exactly are Russians supposed to do if they are allowed to vote only for different versions of war, repression and destruction?

The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that against the backdrop of the war, people have almost stopped talking about corruption, bad roads and dozens of other chronic problems.

All the problems accumulated over the years of Vladimir Putin’s rule — the destruction of state institutions, arbitrariness and the degradation of governance — have been multiplied many times over by the war.

To the old problems have been added fear of mobilization, fear of repression, fear for one’s own life and future, while society has spent years living under chronic nervous tension.

That is why a potential new leader no longer even has to promise victory over corruption, better roads or complex state reforms.

The war has worsened an already degraded system to such an extent that it may be enough for someone simply to come out and say one perfectly ordinary thing:

“The war must end. People need their normal lives back.”

And that alone may be enough for that person to become a new moral and political reference point for a huge number of people.

Against a background of impenetrable darkness, such a politician could very quickly take on the features of a messiah — not because they offer anything extraordinary, but because the authorities themselves have lowered the bar so far that an ordinary demand for peace begins to sound like a revelation.

If everyone capable of saying something as simple as “I am for peace, I am against violence” is systematically removed from the political arena, then the first person who one day manages to say it publicly and be heard by millions may acquire enormous political power almost instantly.

Against impenetrable darkness, even a weak source of light looks like a searchlight.

That is precisely why such a person is extremely dangerous to the current system. The authorities will try to destroy them before they become a real political figure: first informationally, then legally and organizationally — and Russian history shows that the word “destroy” does not always remain a metaphor.

And finally, one more revealing detail. Alexei Zhuravlyov, whose Rodina party initiated the removal of Yabloko, himself came under the scrutiny of investigative journalists because of expensive assets found among his family and close circle that sit poorly with the deputy’s publicly declared financial position.

But apparently these are already minor details. The helpers of evil have no need to be ascetics or simply decent citizens — THEY ARE ALLOWED.

Because the most dangerous thing for today’s Russian authorities is not an individual party, not an individual candidate, and not even another 16,900 rubles.

The most dangerous thing is the idea that things could be different.

Source, Meduza, https://meduza.io/feature/2026/08/12/za-chto-yabloko-snyali-s-vyborov

Source, Verstka, https://verstka.media/deputat-zhuravlev-skryl-aktivy-na-300-mln-rublei-zapisav-ih-na-tainuyu-zhenu-i-byvshuyu-suprugu