The BLUF - August 11th

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This is Atlas, and you’re reading the Bottom Line Up Front, where we cover the top geopolitical stories from around the world every Tuesday!

Today’s topics:

• Sole Russian Political Party Against Ukrainian Conflict Denied From Running In Parliamentary Election

• Scores Injured In 7.4 Mag. Earthquake In Colombia

• Kurdish Peace Prospects Advance In Turkey

Sole Russian Political Party Against Ukrainian Conflict Denied From Running In Parliamentary Election

_{By: Atlas}

Russia's Supreme Court on Monday threw the liberal Yabloko party off the ballot for next month's parliamentary elections, removing the only registered party campaigning against the war in Ukraine just weeks after election officials had unexpectedly cleared it to run.

Judge Vyacheslav Kirillov granted a lawsuit brought by the nationalist, pro-Kremlin Rodina party, annulling the registration of Yabloko's federal candidate list for the September 18-20 vote for the 450-seat State Duma. Kirillov is the same judge who ruled the human rights group Memorial "extremist" earlier this year.

Hundreds of supporters, most of them young, stood outside the Moscow courthouse through the eight-hour hearing, singing songs, waving flags, and carrying apples — the party's name means "apple" in Russian. The party estimated about 500 people lined up to enter a courtroom that seats 150. When word of the ruling reached the crowd, chants of "Shame! Shame!" broke out, and security forces moved to clear the street. "You have two minutes to leave," a police officer warned through a loudspeaker in footage published by the RusNews outlet. "No one will come to get you out of the military enlistment offices afterward."

Party chairman Nikolai Rybakov said Yabloko would appeal within the five-day deadline. "We have a long way ahead and we have a big and important task: to stop deaths and bring the peace back," he told supporters afterward. "Everything we do should be dedicated to that."

The Case Against the Party

Rodina's suit accused Yabloko of receiving foreign funding, violating copyright law, and promoting extremism. The extremism claim rested on material published on the party's website in support of the "international LGBT movement," which the Supreme Court designated extremist in 2023. The copyright complaint stemmed from a senior party member quoting the lyrics of a Soviet-era song, "Let There Always Be Sunshine," in an interview. State prosecutors backed the lawsuit.

At the hearing, Central Election Commission officials said data from Rosfinmonitoring, the state financial watchdog, showed foreign transfers to several Yabloko candidates in 2025, including from Germany and the United States. Because the document was classified "for official use only," the judge briefly adjourned so Yabloko's lawyers could sign nondisclosure agreements before viewing the evidence against their own party.

Rybakov called the accusations "absurd" and told the court the party had taken no foreign money and broken no laws. "We're being funded by Russian citizens, and we answer to Russian citizens, as well as the Central Election Commission," he said. The party's social media campaign, he added, was made by unpaid volunteers. "The young people who make videos in support of us, who came to the Supreme Court today — we don't pay them anything. They support us simply because they want to live in Russia, and they don't want to be killed."

A Fringe Party That Suddenly Wasn't

Yabloko is Russia's oldest liberal party, founded after the Soviet collapse, and entered the Duma in 1993, 1995, and 1999. It has not cleared the 5% threshold since, and it won just 1.34% in 2021. The party expelled Alexei Navalny in 2007 and kept its distance from him, but it has been the country's most consistent anti-war voice, opposing the Chechnya wars, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and the full-scale invasion.

That marginal record may explain why the Central Election Commission registered more than 400 of its candidates in late July — a decision some analysts read as a Kremlin attempt to demonstrate that anti-war sentiment holds little sway. The calculation appears to have changed as the party's numbers moved. The state pollster VTsIOM had put Yabloko at around 3% earlier this year, but recent surveys reported by the Moscow newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta suggested it could win 9% — comfortably enough for seats — as ruling party United Russia's rating sank to 33% amid inflation, internet blackouts, and Ukrainian drone strikes reaching deep into the country.

The party campaigned on what it called the shortest platform in its history: "For peace and freedom! For a life without fear! For a ceasefire agreement, diplomacy, and the achievement of peace!" On August 6, exiled opposition figures including Yulia Navalnaya urged Russians to vote for it. "We must view the upcoming elections — no matter how unfair they may be — as the only legitimate and safe opportunity to express our disagreement with the government," she said.

After Monday's ruling, Navalnaya wrote that "the Kremlin got frightened." "It was not even a matter of support for Yabloko," she said. "But the fact that millions of Russians would have the opportunity to say what they really think about Putin and the war." Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oligarch now in exile in London, put it in similar terms: "The Kremlin only tolerates opposition parties when it can control the outcome. Hundreds of people showing up at the courthouse today made sure Yabloko was not one of those cases."

Oleg Orlov, co-chair of Memorial, told Echo Moskvy the authorities had initially seen Yabloko as "a kind of punching bag" that would pull its usual 2%. "Then, suddenly — unexpectedly, for them — Yabloko has turned into a genuinely serious contender."

Pressure That Preceded the Ruling

The court decision capped months of narrowing. More than a dozen prominent Yabloko members had already been barred from the federal race after being charged with displaying "extremist symbols," mostly over social media posts about Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in 2024. Deputy leader Maxim Kruglov was sentenced in June to seven years in prison for posts about civilian deaths in Bucha, Mariupol, and other Ukrainian cities. Regional authorities blocked the party from several local ballots, and last week Yabloko reported a cyberattack shortly after launching a donation appeal for its campaign fund.

Boris Nadezhdin, the country's most visible anti-war politician, was barred separately last month after being declared a foreign agent and charged over a video containing an image of Navalny. He fled Russia and surfaced in Paris last week. Yabloko's Lev Shlosberg, one of the few anti-war critics still in the country, faces charges of spreading false information about the army, announced days before his house arrest was to end.

Grigory Yavlinsky, the party's founder, said the ruling revealed more than it removed. "The public demand for peace and freedom has turned out to be significantly stronger than the authorities anticipated," he wrote. "Excluding Yabloko from the election means refusing to engage in dialogue with people who ask questions that are uncomfortable for those in power."

What the Ballot Looks Like Now

All 10 remaining parties in the race either support the war or decline to criticize it. Independent polls show most Russians favor negotiations to end a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers, while President Vladimir Putin has rejected US and Ukrainian ceasefire proposals that would freeze the front lines, insisting Ukraine cede territory Russia has not captured.

Some analysts read the reversal on Yabloko as evidence of infighting between security hardliners and the Kremlin's political technocrats over who controls the system after the vote, rather than the vote itself. Others see simpler arithmetic. Without an anti-war option on the ballot, turnout among government opponents is likely to fall — and a low-turnout election favors the Kremlin, which retains the resources to produce the result it wants. Independent election monitors have been stripped of most of their ability to observe the process.

"The last time Yabloko crossed the 5 percent threshold was in 1999," wrote Brian Taylor, a Russia scholar at Syracuse University. "Yet Putin/the Kremlin is afraid of them now because they could attract a notable anti-war vote, despite vote rigging."

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