Press Release, 8.09.2026

Photo: Alexander Muravyev / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

The Moscow Region Court has revoked the registration of Alexander Muravyev, Yabloko’s candidate for the State Duma for Lyubertsy single-mandate constituency No. 122. He became the fourth Yabloko single-mandate candidate removed from the elections in a single day, on 8 September, and the seventh party single-mandate candidate to have his registration revoked in recent days.

The claim against Muravyev was filed by his rival, Yuri Parkhomenko, a candidate from the Party of Pensioners.

One of the main objections concerned Muravyev’s campaign video, which had been broadcast repeatedly during free airtime on the 360 TV channel. In it, the candidate used the slogan “For a Free Internet Without Blocking”. The claimant argued that in doing so, Muravyev had spread material likely to foster negative attitudes among voters towards other candidates and parties.

In support of this argument, the claim cited publications linking internet blocking to the actions of the United Russia, LDPR and New People parliamentary parties. On this basis, the claimant concluded that Muravyev’s slogan effectively created negative sentiment towards these parties and their candidates. Since the video had been shown repeatedly on the 360 TV channel, this was cited as grounds for revoking his registration.

In court, Parkhomenko’s representative, Yevgeny Kaplan, explained that the subject of internet blocks was a sensitive one, and that the slogan could therefore be understood as campaigning against other parties. When Muravyev asked how Parkhomenko’s own rights, as a candidate nominated by the Party of Pensioners, had been infringed, the claimant’s representative replied that this party was simply accused of blocks less often.

Muravyev was also accused of copyright infringement — of using an unlicensed font in his campaign materials and of posting a video on VKontakte, taken from a broadcast, that carried the “Radio 1” branding.

Muravyev maintained that the VKontakte page examined by the claimant’s side was a fake. He also denied producing the material cited by the claimant that used the unlicensed font, and insisted on a psycho-linguistic expert examination of the slogan. The claimants did not carry out such an examination.

The court granted the claim and revoked the candidate’s registration.

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 claim was filed by a representative of the Greens party.

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.

The third candidate removed on 8 September was Yuri Vaskin, Yabloko’s candidate for Odintsovo single-mandate constituency No. 124. The Moscow Region Court granted a claim filed by Dmitry Shatalov, a candidate from the Party of Pensioners. The grounds were QR codes in Vaskin’s campaign leaflet, which led to a Telegram channel and a VKontakte page belonging to Odintsovo Yabloko, on which reposts of material from the party’s official resources had been published.

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).

Alexander Muravyev thus became the seventh 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.