Russia bars Putin opponent from standing

Russia has banned a vocal opponent of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine from standing in a presidential election next month after he started gaining too much support.

Russia’s Central Election Commission ruled that about 9,000 of the 100,000 supporting signatures Boris Nadezhdin submitted to get on the ballot were not legitimate and breached its rules.

Yeah, right.

(Irony alert.)

Mr Nadezhdin, said that he would appeal to Russia’s Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.

“We conducted the collection openly and honestly. The whole world watched the queues at our headquarters and collection points,” he said. 

“You are not denying me, but tens of millions of people who hope for change.”

The Kremlin wants to use the presidential election, scheduled for mid-March, to showcase ordinary Russians’ support for Mr Putin’s war in Ukraine and analysts suggested that the Putin regime had been wrong-footed by the show of support for Mr Nadezhdin.

Russians are banned from protesting directly against the war, but they had queued up across the country in their hundreds in freezing conditions to sign their support for Mr Nadezhdin. Any form of anti-Kremlin activity is risks attracting hostile attention from the authorities in Russia.


Successive regimes in Russia have, of course, been rigging elections for a very long time. It all reminds me of a joke I was told as a boy:

"Thieves  broke into the Kremlin last night and stole next year's election results."


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