Press Release, 22.08.2024

Photo:  Vladimir Dorokhov / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

On 19 August, Vladimir Dorokhov, Chairman of the Tula branch Yabloko and Deputy Chairman of Yabloko, received two money transfers to his accounts from an Armenian citizen whom Dorokhov does not know. Each transfer amounted to 2,000 roubles. Vladimir Dorokhov is certain that this is a planned action to assign him the status of a “foreign agent” receiving money from abroad. Earlier, Dorokhov, who was a Yabloko candidate in the elections to the Tula City Duma, was marked as a “foreign agent” in the GAS Vybory system (a special federal automated system for counting votes at elections) despite the fact that he had never had such a status. The politician contacted the police and submitted statements to banks with a request to return these payments. In addition, Dorokhov applied to the Central Bank and the Federal Security Service (FSB).

Vladimir Dorokhov notes that he did not give anyone his bank account numbers. However, the Tula Region Electoral Commission has these data: the politician submitted it to the Electoral Commission when he was nominated for the elections.

“It was obvious that this issue was being worked on, someone mixed something up, and false information was published,” Dorokhov comments on his status of a “foreign agent” on the GAS Vybory system. “Now, apparently, they want, on principle, to finish what they started. That is, Tula officials are virtually trying to “reach” in such a way the Ministry of Justice, which apparently finds it difficult to understand why there is a great political need to recognise a candidate who has already been withdrawn as a foreign agent.”

It should be noted that the Tula Region Electoral Commission did not register the list of Yabloko candidates for the City Duma elections, as it allegedly found 256 invalid signatures out of 2,316 submitted. The Yabloko team in Tula conducted its own analysis of the verification results and signature sheets and came to the conclusion that the number of “invalid” signatures was specially adjusted to the non-passing percentage.

Since the end of 2022, seven Yabloko members have been recognised as “foreign agents”: Deputy Chairmen of Yabloko Lev Shlosberg and Boris Vishnevsky, member of the Federal Political Committee and human rights defender Svetlana Gannushkina, Deputy Chairman of the Moscow Yabloko Andrei Morev, journalist and Nobel Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, and  municipal deputies Nikolai Kuzmin (the Pskov Region) and Sergei Troshin (St. Petersburg).