Press Release, 13.02.2026

Photo: A hearing at the Shchyolkovo City Court, which examined Yabloko’s claim against the Territorial Electoral Commission / Photo by the Moscow Region branch of  Yabloko

The Moscow Region branch of Yabloko has published video recordings of four serious violations committed during the 2025 elections in the town of Fryazino, the Moscow Region. These materials — key evidence of electoral fraud on the part of the Territorial Electoral Commissions (TECs) — had been stored on a flash drive, featured in court proceedings, and then went suddenly missing between the first and second judicial instances.

In 2025, elections to municipal councils of deputies took place across the Moscow Region. Yabloko candidates were removed from the ballot in most towns in the region; however, the campaign in Fryazino — conducted, as elsewhere, under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom” — withstood the pressure: Yabloko candidate Alexander Furshchik passed through all the administrative “filters” and made it to the ballot. Already on the first day of the three-day voting, serious violations were identified during remote electronic voting: the town administration and the management of various institutions had managed to mobilise nearly half of all voters to use remote electronic voting which is non-transparent for election observers. In breach of the law, virtually “secluded” polling stations were organised, where administrative staff “assisted” voters, working from pre-compiled lists, to vote for a predetermined set of five candidates, despite the fact that remote electronic voting is designed to be conducted by voters from home. Yabloko observers documented on video the redirecting of voters to these “secluded” polling points, and some observers even found themselves among those whom the election organisers were sending to vote at the “right” locations.

On 12 September, observers also recorded other serious violations when ballot boxes were collected. According to Alexander Furshchik, the boxes had been sealed only in a formal sense, but had been assembled in a way that did not protect against unauthorised access: “A complaint was immediately submitted to the TEC, but no response followed. By the following morning, it had become clear that the contents of the boxes looked visibly different from the photographs taken the previous evening, after the polling stations had closed,” Furshchik said.

Alexander Furshchik subsequently took the matter to court, seeking to have the TEC’s decisions on the election results declared unlawful, in particular in electoral district No. 2 in Fryazino, where he had stood as a candidate. In the course of a single seven-hour hearing in January 2026, the Shchyolkovo City Court examined the complaints against the TEC, heard witnesses and lawyers, and then dismissed the claim.

The Chairman of Moscow Region Yabloko, Sergei Kryzhov, described the court’s ruling as “a de facto endorsement of electoral manipulation”, noting that the court had refused to request key evidence, thereby demonstrating that the law could be disregarded in the Moscow Region when a particular result was required.

It was at this point that Alexander Furshchik found out that the flash drive containing the video evidence of the fraud was missing in court — the very recordings made in September, submitted to the court in December, and effectively ignored by the court in January. The current whereabouts of the flash drive with the video recordings remain unknown.

An appeal against the first-instance ruling has been lodged with the Moscow Region Court; a hearing date has not yet been set. It is already known, however, that Yabloko will again seek to have the video evidence admitted to the case — the recordings had not been stored solely on the missing flash drive, copies remain in the possession of the party’s regional branch.

In addition, Moscow Region Yabloko has made the video recordings and their transcripts publicly available. The materials demonstrate the organisation of unlawful remote electronic voting points, to which voters — dispatched by their superiors — were “recommended” to go in order to cast their votes for specific candidates.

The Chairman of the Moscow Region branch, Sergei Kryzhov noted that Yabloko had witnessed a great deal. It was for this reason, he emphasised, that Yabloko members ultimately published the missing videos before the appeal hearing, so that voters could see what the court of first instance had chosen to ignore.