Press Release, 12.08.2026

Photo: The Supreme Court examines Grigory Yavlinsky’s interview / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The Supreme Court has sent Yabloko its reasoned ruling on the removal of the party’s federal list of candidates from the State Duma elections, following a suit brought by the Rodina political party. The formal grounds cited were rouble-denominated donations from Russian nationals who had themselves received money from abroad, publications in support of Yabloko on social networks blocked or restricted in Russia, and alleged copyright infringements. These included the use of lines from the song “Let the Sun Shine Forever” and the phrase “As Long As There’s No War”, as well as an image generated with the use of ChatGPT. The court declined to recognise ChatGPT as artificial intelligence.

The court did not accept some of Rodina’s allegations, including its objections to the nomination of the list and its claims that the Yabloko’s campaign materials showed signs of extremism.

Yabloko firmly rejects all the accusations brought against it and believes that they were convincingly disproved in the course of the proceedings. The party intends to prove it is right at the appeal stage. The real reason for its removal is Yabloko’s platform “For Peace and Freedom!”, on which it is standing in the elections. Neither the authors of the suit nor those behind them conceal this fact.

Below is a detailed summary of the Supreme Court’s ruling of 10 August 2026:

One of the grounds for the list’s removal was donations to the election fund from citizens who had themselves received money from abroad. According to data from Rosfinmonitoring (the Federal Financial Monitoring Service), cited by Central Electoral Commission representative Sergei Sakharov during the hearing on 10 August, money had been transferred to Yabloko between 9 July and 2 August by people who, over the same period, had received a total of approximately 2.8 million roubles from foreign sources. In total, Rosfinmonitoring identified 74 people among the party’s donors and other counterparties who, between April 2023 and August 2026, had received around 80 million roubles from 310 foreign individuals.

Yabloko’s representatives explained in court that the fact that the party’s donors had received money from abroad did not in itself mean the party was foreign-funded: for example, a person might have received such funds from the sale of foreign shares, and then made a donation from their own funds, obtained from Russian sources. The party also stated that donations found not to comply with electoral legislation had been returned to their senders. Their total came to 16,900 roubles (a fact the court’s ruling omits). The Supreme Court, however, held that Yabloko had not provided evidence that these donations had been returned.

Another ground the court cited for the list’s removal was the dissemination of material about Yabloko on social networks and internet platforms to which access is restricted in Russia. The ruling names Instagram and Facebook, which belong to Meta — an organisation designated as extremist in Russia — as well as X and YouTube. The court referred to data from Medialogia: between 27 June and 6 August, there appeared around 67,800 publications about the party bearing signs of campaign material, which received approximately 7.1 million reactions and potentially reached 527 million users. Following the list’s registration on 29 July, around 40,900 such publications and 5.5 million reactions were recorded.

The court concluded that the placement of campaign material on these platforms could not have been paid for out of the election fund. As evidence of expenditure outside the fund, the court relied on an assessment of the commercial value of such advertising submitted by the claimant. According to this assessment, Yabloko’s spending on social media promotion had allegedly amounted to 88 million roubles. Under the law, expenditure outside the election fund exceeding 35 million roubles is grounds for the cancellation of a federal candidate list’s registration. The court did not comment at all on the defence’s argument that these publications had been posted by social media users and the media on their own initiative, without any request from Yabloko or any arrangement with the party.

A further ground for removing the list was a copyright complaint over an interview with Grigory Yavlinsky published on the Yabloko’s website. The court held that the use in the interview of lines from the song “Let the Sun Shine Forever” and the phrase “As Long As There’s No War” (commonly used by Russians in everyday speech) — which it linked to Alexander Volodin’s play Five Evenings — constituted an infringement. Objections were also raised over data from the Levada Centre cited in the interview, the logos of other political parties, drawn portraits of Dmitry Medvedev and Victoria Bonya, and a drawn still from Sergei Bondarchuk’s film War and Peace. In the court’s view, the party should have obtained the rights holders’ consent to use these materials.

Yabloko had argued that the photographs and illustrations used had been created by the interview’s authors themselves, and that the phrases “Let the Sun Shine Forever” and “As Long As There’s No War” were common expressions. The court rejected these arguments. The Supreme Court also disagreed with the argument that Grigory Yavlinsky was not a candidate in the election: it held that his interview constituted campaign material, since Grigory Yavlinsky is a party member and Chair of its Federal Political Committee, and the interview itself had been published on Yabloko’s official website. During the proceedings, Mikhail Ostrovsky, son of the composer Arkady Ostrovsky, publicly stated that he had no objection to the use of the song “Let the Sun Shine Forever” in Yabloko’s campaign and gave the party permission to use it; however, the court did not take this into account.

A separate objection concerned the use on Yabloko’s website of an image generated with the help of ChatGPT. The court held that the rights to the image belonged to OpenAI and that the party should have obtained the company’s consent to publish it.

Photo: The court examines an image titled “The European railway station of the future”, generated with the use of ChatGPT / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The Supreme Court did not accept Yabloko’s argument that ChatGPT is artificial intelligence. The ruling states that artificial intelligence is a “complex of technological solutions” encompassing software, infrastructure and data-processing services. On this basis, the court effectively held that ChatGPT was not artificial intelligence itself, but one of the outputs or elements of such a complex, and recognised the image created with its help as an object of intellectual property rights.

The Supreme Court found some of the objections to Yabloko’s campaign material to be unfounded. In particular, it found no copyright infringement in the use of a photograph by Anatoly Zhdanov, since the party had produced an agreement with the rights holder, the publishing house Kommersant. The court also dismissed objections to the use of a photograph of the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima: the image had been published more than 80 years earlier and, according to the ruling, could be freely used.

Nor did the court find any infringement in the use of Yabloko’s emblem, which, according to the claimant, had allegedly resembled the artist El Lissitzky’s poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, or in the use of an image of a dove of peace: the party had produced documents confirming its rights to the relevant images and design. The court further found that a joint photograph of the Governor of St. Petersburg and the Chair of the Central Electoral Commission, published by Yabloko on Instagram, had been informational rather than promotional in character.

The Supreme Court also dismissed Rodina’s objections to the nomination of Yabloko’s list itself. The claimant had argued, among other things, that candidates had not closed their foreign accounts or divested themselves of foreign financial assets before being nominated. The court, however, pointed out that these objections related to the stage at which the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) certified the list. Since the CEC’s decision of 10 July to certify the list had not been appealed or overturned, the court declined to consider these arguments when deciding the question of removing a list that had already been registered.

The court separately noted that the material submitted by Rodina alleging signs of extremism in Yabloko’s campaign material could only be examined in separate proceedings, and only if corresponding evidence were produced.