Press Release, 8.09.2026

Photo: Yuri Vaskin / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

On 8 September, the Moscow Region Court revoked the registration of Yuri Vaskin, Yabloko’s candidate for the State Duma for Odintsovo single-mandate constituency No. 124 (Moscow Region). He became the third party candidate removed from the elections that day, and the sixth Yabloko single-mandate candidate to have his registration revoked in recent days.

The court granted a claim brought by Vaskin’s rival in the election, Dmitry Shatalov, a candidate from the Party of Pensioners.

The grounds for removal were QR codes placed in Vaskin’s campaign leaflet. These led to a Telegram channel and a VKontakte page belonging to the Odintsovo branch of Yabloko, which had in turn published reposts of material from the party’s official resources.

The claimant cited the Supreme Court’s ruling of 10 August, which, in the case concerning the revocation of Yabloko’s federal list, had found a number of the party’s publications to infringe copyright. In Shatalov’s view, the presence in Vaskin’s campaign leaflet of QR codes leading to resources containing reposts of these publications meant that the candidate was distributing the material himself.

Vaskin learned of the claim only the day before the hearing.

The candidate argued that he was not the author of the disputed publications and that they had been posted on the party’s official resources. In his view, the claimant’s logic would in effect mean that a candidate could be held responsible for the content of any website reachable through a chain of links starting from a page he had linked to.

Vaskin also drew the court’s attention to the fact that some of the material cited in the claim dated from November 2025, long before the State Duma election, had even been appointed.

In his closing statement, the candidate said his campaign had been built around personal meetings with constituency residents, of which he said he had held around a thousand:

“Most people support the party’s platform, which is expressed very simply: ‘For Peace and Freedom, For a Life Without Fear’.”

The prosecutor asked for the claim to be granted. The judge rejected Vaskin’s objections and revoked the candidate’s registration.

Yuri Vaskin became the third Yabloko candidate to be removed from the State Duma elections on 8 September.

Earlier that day, the Chelyabinsk Regional Court had revoked the registration of Yaroslav Shcherbakov, Chairman of Chelyabinsk Yabloko, in constituency No. 188. The claim was based on objections to his campaign materials, which used Banksy’s work “Girl with Balloon”, an image of Andrei Sakharov together with his words “The disunity of mankind threatens it with destruction”, and a quote from Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko: “Ten years of negotiations are better than one day of war”.

The Nizhny Novgorod Regional Court, on the same day, removed Yabloko’s candidate for Avtozavodsky constituency No. 133, Dmitry Smirnov. The claim was prompted by a photograph of Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister, which Smirnov had posted on VKontakte in December 2015 after the musician’s death. In the photograph, Kilmister is wearing a German cross around his neck.

Courts had already removed three other Yabloko candidates from the elections on 31 August: Alexei Akimenko  in Bashkortostan (constituency No. 6), Ayrat Gumerbaev in Tatarstan (constituency No. 34), and Anton Paramonov in the Tula Region (constituency No. 181).

Yuri Vaskin thus became the sixth Yabloko single-mandate candidate to be removed from the State Duma elections. None of these rulings has yet entered into legal force, and all will be appealed. The candidates are continuing their election campaigns.