Press Release, 17.07.2026

Photo: Inna Boluchevskaya, Olga Tuzhikova, and Anna Pavlova / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The Republic of Karelia has become the first region where the Electoral Commission has allowed Yabloko candidates to stand in the elections to the Legislative Assembly of the region.

Yabloko’s list in Karelia is headed by:

INNA BOLUCHEVSKAYA, 54, Deputy Chair of the Committee on Healthcare and Social Policy of the Legislative Assembly of the Republic of Karelia, Yabloko member.

OLGA TUZHIKOVA, 45, lawyer, deputy of the Petrozavodsk City Council, member of the Bureau of Karelian Yabloko.

ANNA PAVLOVA, 44, assistant to a lawyer at the First Bar Association of the Republic of Karelia.

A further 15 candidates are also standing as part of regional groups within the unified list of Yabloko.

“The candidate list has been registered in full, which speaks to the thoroughness of the preparation of the documents and the extensive groundwork involved,” notes Inna Boluchevskaya. “We are going into this election resolved to win and eager to work for the people. I would remind you that candidates from Karelia, like Yabloko candidates across Russia, are running in the elections under the slogan ‘For Peace and Freedom! For a Life Without Fear’, a position shared today by millions of people whose interests we hope to represent in parliament.”

Karelia is the first region where a Yabloko candidate list for the Legislative Assembly elections has been registered. However, due to pressure on the party, several well-known Yabloko members in the region have been denied the right to take part in the forthcoming election campaign, notes Yabloko Chairman Nikolai Rybakov:

“Karelia has historically been one of the most politically competitive regions in the country; dozens of thousands of the republic’s residents regularly vote for Yabloko here. That is why the party’s representatives, and I am speaking in particular of Emilia Slabunova, a deputy in the Karelian parliament and the party’s third Chair, and of Dmitry Rybakov, an ecologist and head of the Yabloko faction in the Petrozavodsk City Council, have worked successfully in the region for many years. It is precisely because of their work, their principled stance in demanding peace, that the authorities did everything this year to prevent them from standing in the election. Nevertheless, the candidate list has been registered, and we are working to ensure that similarly positive and long-awaited news comes from other regions of Russia soon.”

It should be noted that the candidates were approved by the party’s 23rd Congress at the end of June, and the region’s Electoral Commission certified  the list as early as 1 July.

Yabloko has put forward candidates for legislative assembly elections in twelve regions, including those where the party has been already represented: Karelia, the Pskov Region and St. Petersburg.