The decision to remove Yabloko from the elections was made personally by Putin, journalist Mikhail Zygar says

The decision to remove Yabloko from the elections was made personally by Putin, journalist Mikhail Zygar says

He reported this in an article for Der Spiegel, citing sources familiar with discussions of the matter in the Kremlin.

According to him, by that point the FSB and Vladimir Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko, had spoken in favor of the decision.

🔹“Their motives may have differed, but the outcome was the same: keeping Yabloko on the ballot now appeared too great a risk,” Zygar notes.

He says that even if the party had cleared the five-percent threshold to enter the State Duma, it would not have posed “a serious threat to Putin’s rule,” but “the experiment itself was dangerous.”

🔹“For several weeks, a completely legal anti-war campaign could have unfolded across Russia. Candidates could have met with voters. Volunteers could have distributed campaign materials. People could have attended events and publicly declared their support for a party calling for a ceasefire. And on election day, this part of society would, for the first time, have had a single choice on the ballot. Thus, Yabloko would have turned not so much into a contender for political power as into a barometer of public sentiment,” the journalist noted.

Zygar believes that even under conditions of controlled vote counting, “the campaign could have shown how great the real demand for ending the war is.”

🔹“Photographs of queues, crowded events, the number of volunteers, and results from individual polling stations could have answered the question the Kremlin had tried to avoid answering for four and a half years: how many Russians actually want this war to end?” he added.

In Zygar’s view, until the summer of 2026 the Kremlin considered the party “manageable,” but in a situation where public politics in Russia has practically disappeared, “even completely controlled figures can suddenly become genuine mouthpieces of public discontent.”

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