Anti-war Putin rival barred from Russian presidential race

Vladimir Putin is taking no chances with his reelection for a fifth term. Boris Nadezhdin, the only presidential hopeful critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has now been removed from the ballot.  

On Thursday, the Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) disqualified Nadezhdin due to what it said were paperwork discrepancies. 

Russian law requires candidates from nonparliamentary parties to collect 100,000 signatures of endorsement. Nadezhdin’s team reported gathering around 200,000, submitting the legal maximum of 105,000 to the CEC. On Monday, the CEC invalidated 15 percent of the first 60,000 signatures, putting Nadezhdin below the 5 percent defect rate limit.

“You are not refusing me, but tens of millions of people who are hoping for change,” Nadezhin commented on the refusal on his Telegram channel.

“Tens of millions of people here were going to vote for me. I am in second place after Putin,” he said.

Nadezhdin had anticipated the CEC’s refusal. “We will appeal not only the refusal itself but also the procedure of the signature verification and, at the same time, the federal law,” Nadezhdin said on the independent YouTube Breakfast Show on Wednesday. According to him, neither the CEC nor Nadezhdin’s team would have had enough time to verify all the signatures that the CEC questioned.  

Nadezhdin asked the CEC to give him another two days — but the head of the commission, Ella Pamfilova, refused, saying: “The deadlines have been met with a margin.”

Nadezhdin’s anti-war stance has drawn thousands to his campaign offices. Queues of his supporters became one of the most significant displays of public dissent since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.     

“Nadezhdin’s campaign was an unexpected happening … the Kremlin urgently concluded,” Alexander Kynev, a Moscow-based independent political analyst, told POLITICO.

He anticipates a Kremlin-led campaign to discredit Nadezhdin.  

Tatiana Kolobakina, a 24-year-old Moscow journalist and political activist, supported Nadezhdin to legally express her anti-war sentiments, despite expecting his rejection from the race.

“It was important to show that there are many of us who are against. The entire state aims to make us feel like a small minority. Well, these queues show that this is not the case,” she told POLITICO.  

A Nadezhdin campaign volunteer, 25-year-old Alexei Popov from Yakutsk some 5,000 kilometers from Moscow, also anticipated the CEC’s refusal. “This doesn’t mean that it was all in vain.”

The upcoming “‘election’ is still an excellent way to draw people’s attention to political processes and problems in Russia,” he said.  

A former Kremlin political consultant told POLITICO that an anti-war candidate on the ballot threatened Putin’s campaign. “Once registered, he would get access to the state TV,” said the consultant, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about recent employees. Such a level of access to the public was dangerous in and of itself, the consultant explained.

“Why were they afraid of dissidents in the USSR? Not because one could overturn the state. The system itself did not allow any dissent — and they are now cosplaying the Soviet system,” the consultant remarked.

Nadezhdin’s success surprised many, including both the candidate and the Kremlin, the consultant said.

The Russian election is scheduled for March 15 to 17.   

Sergey Goryashko is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.