Nikolai Rybakov sits in Yabloko’s Moscow headquarters wearing a small peace-dove pin. Nearby is a handwritten sign: “People, don’t kill each other.” In today’s Russia, even that sentence can sound less like a political slogan than an act of defiance.
Russia’s Supreme Court has barred Yabloko from September’s State Duma election. The party is appealing, but its chances of returning to the ballot appear limited. Formally, the case concerns alleged violations of election rules. Politically, it removes the country’s only registered party openly calling for an end to the war.
Rybakov believes the authorities are worried not so much about Yabloko’s organizational strength as about the growing resonance of its simple anti-war message. After the ruling, hundreds of supporters outside the court shouted “Shame!” loudly enough to be heard inside the building.
As Daycom has previously assessed, that is what makes Yabloko’s exclusion more significant than an ordinary dispute over election procedure. The Kremlin is not removing a rival capable of taking power tomorrow. It is closing a legal channel through which public exhaustion with the war might become visible.
Yabloko has not been a major parliamentary force for years. It holds only a handful of regional seats and has no representation in the State Duma, where United Russia and system-approved opposition parties dominate political life.
That makes it difficult to explain the ban as a defensive move against an imminent loss of parliamentary control.
September’s election will fill all 450 seats in the lower house, but there is little serious uncertainty over who will dominate it. United Russia is overwhelmingly likely to retain control. Even a better-than-expected result for Yabloko would not alter that balance.
It could, however, alter something more politically sensitive: the visible map of public opinion.
In an authoritarian system, elections do more than distribute seats. They create one of the few sanctioned moments when citizens are invited to choose among versions of the future that the state is prepared to tolerate.
The danger for the Kremlin begins when one of those options challenges not a technical policy choice but the central premise of the political system.
For Yabloko, that premise is the war.
Rybakov’s message is not ideologically complex. The party speaks of peace, democracy and a prosperous Russia. Under different political conditions, those would be conventional campaign themes.
In the current system, they have become radical.
For years, the Kremlin has constructed a political narrative in which the war is presented not as a discretionary choice by the leadership but as an unavoidable historical confrontation.
Within that framework, opposition to the war can be reframed as opposition to the state itself.
That is why pressure on anti-war politics operates differently from ordinary electoral competition.
The authorities do not necessarily need to ban every organization outright. A more efficient method is to allow a party to exist legally while denying it the ability to convert public discontent into measurable political representation.
Yabloko may keep an office. It may hold meetings. It may remain registered.
But if its name does not appear on the ballot, millions of people who might share its position lose even the opportunity to make a symbolic anti-war choice through the formal political system.
Rybakov argues that this is one of the central objectives of the authorities: to convince people that they are alone.
For an authoritarian system, that is an extraordinarily powerful instrument.
A citizen may be tired of the war, worried about casualties, angry over mobilization, inflation or isolation. But if no visible legal force reflects those views, discontent remains private.
Millions of private doubts do not automatically become a political movement.
Instead, each person may assume that he or she is an exception — the only one in a workplace, town or family who thinks differently.
That is why political repression often begins not by outlawing an opinion, but by preventing people from discovering how many others share it.
Rybakov is building his strategy around the opposite idea.
He tells supporters that the court ruling is not the end but the beginning. The party can be kept off the ballot. Its members can be pressured. Its leaders can be targeted.
But an administrative decision cannot erase the existence of people who want the war to end.
That is a politically potent argument, even if the true size of Russia’s anti-war constituency remains extremely difficult to measure.
Open opposition carries legal and personal risks. Wartime censorship, prosecutions for “discrediting” the armed forces and the expansive use of “foreign agent” designations have made public dissent potentially dangerous.
That makes polling unusually difficult.
A respondent may be unwilling to tell a stranger what he really thinks about the army, the president or the war — particularly after years in which a careless statement could threaten employment, freedom or family security.
Even under those conditions, however, the numbers have begun to move.
In July, the share of Russians saying they supported the actions of the armed forces in Ukraine fell to 66%, the lowest level since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
Sixty-six percent is still a majority.
It would be a mistake to treat that figure as evidence of an imminent anti-war revolt. Russian society remains substantially loyal to, resigned to or adapted to the war. There is also a vast distance between war fatigue and readiness to confront the Kremlin.
But for the authorities, the direction of movement matters almost as much as the absolute level.
If support continues to decline, even gradually, a legal party with a clear peace message could convert scattered exhaustion into a visible political result.
That is exactly the kind of development authoritarian systems tend to prevent before it can be tested.
Yabloko would not need to win.
A few million votes could be enough to change the psychological landscape.
For the first time, Russians could see a concrete number attached to people prepared to vote against continuation of the war.
A number like that creates political reality.
It undermines the claim that “everyone supports it.” It gives dissenters a sense of community. It can create regional networks, observers, candidates and an alternative agenda.
For the Kremlin, it is safer not to allow the experiment.
The formal basis for Yabloko’s exclusion is a lawsuit alleging undeclared campaign support, including from Western sources. The party rejects the accusations and is appealing the ruling.
In Russia’s political system, legal procedure has long served as a method of managing competition.
An opposition figure does not always have to be formally declared an enemy. Authorities can instead point to documentation, financing, signatures, registration requirements or campaign rules.
The decision remains legal in form.
The political result is the same.
This allows the Kremlin to preserve the architecture of elections while excluding forces capable of producing an unpredictable signal.
Rybakov, however, is choosing a different path from many Russian opposition figures of recent years.
He says he will not leave the country.
Since 2022, large numbers of activists, journalists, politicians and civic figures have gone into exile because of prosecution or the threat of criminal cases.
Rybakov is choosing the opposite model: remain inside Russia for as long as possible.
“I am in Russia and will remain in Russia” is not merely a personal declaration. It is a political strategy.
His argument is straightforward. Changing Russian politics from outside the country is extraordinarily difficult. Exiled opposition movements can preserve media, international links and a public voice, but over time they risk losing daily contact with the people they hope to represent.
For Rybakov, physical presence inside Russia is therefore part of political legitimacy.
It is also his greatest vulnerability.
The more closely Yabloko becomes associated with a genuine anti-war alternative, the less comfortable its position becomes in a system that tolerates opposition only while it remains politically harmless.
For years, the Russian model allowed several levels of disagreement.
Local officials could be criticized. Taxes, utility bills and roads could be debated. Occasionally, individual government decisions could be challenged.
But questioning subjects the Kremlin has defined as fundamental to the state is much more dangerous.
The war is one of those subjects.
Yabloko is therefore testing the boundary of what remains permissible.
Its rhetoric is not revolutionary. The party does not call for violent regime change. Rybakov is not advocating insurrection. His central message is almost pacifist: people should not kill one another.
Yet in a system where the war has become central to political legitimacy, even pacifism acquires explosive meaning.
That is why Yabloko’s story matters for Russia’s future.
The question is not whether the party can win the 2026 parliamentary election. It almost certainly cannot.
The question is whether any legal space will remain inside Russia where anti-war sentiment can survive the war itself and later develop into organized politics.
If that space disappears, dissent will not disappear with it.
It will simply become invisible.
Invisible dissent is both convenient and dangerous for authoritarian power. It is easy to ignore, but extremely difficult to measure.
The Kremlin can control parliament, national television, electoral commissions and party lists.
It is much harder to control the moment when the private exhaustion of millions of people stops being private.
That is the possibility on which Rybakov is betting.
He may lose the appeal. Yabloko may remain absent from the September ballot. The party may continue to look small according to every formal measure of political power.
But if support for the war continues to erode, the Kremlin’s main problem will no longer be Yabloko itself.
It will be the people for whom the simple sentence “the war must end” no longer sounds marginal.
At that point, removing Yabloko from the election may look less like a demonstration of confidence than an admission of fear — fear that even a tightly managed ballot could reveal more about Russia than the Kremlin is prepared to let Russians see.
