Press Release, 14.10.2021

Photo: Photo collage by the Yabloko Press Service

A faction of the Yabloko party has been created in the Petrozavodsk City Council, Karelia. It includes two deputies from Yabloko: Dmitry Rybakov and Olga Tuzhikova. Dmitry Rybakov became the leader of the faction, he headed the list of the party candidates in the elections to the City Council.

The decision to create a parliamentary faction was made on 11 October, and on 13 October the official decision was sent to the Chairman of the city parliament.

Dmitry Rybakov is a senior researcher at the Institute of Geology of the Karelian Scientific Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was a deputy of the City Council of Petrozavodsk from 2007 to 2011 and headed the permanent commission on environmental policy there. Today Dmitry Rybakov is one of the leaders of the inner-party faction Green Russia.

Olga Tuzhikova has three higher educations: environmental, economic and legal. In Petrozavodsk, she has been well known for the struggle to preserve the Kamenny Bor park, which the city authorities have given for development.

In the elections of 19 September, the Petrozavodsk Yabloko was able to gain about 11 per cent of the vote, despite numerous falsifications. In 2011, two Yabloko candidates were elected to the City Council, but at that time a faction could not be made up of two deputies. In 2016, the party list, which was headed by Galina Shirshina, the ex-mayor of Petrozavodsk, was removed from the elections to the City Council.