Paring the ballot. Russia’s Supreme Court strikes Yabloko, the sole antiwar party, from the September ballot over… copyright violations

The lawsuit, which Faridaily read in full before the hearing, ran to 40 pages and made three arguments. Only the first carried the ruling: copyright.

The court was offered to examine a banner from the Yabloko’s website: the slogan “For peace and freedom! For a ceasefire agreement!” set over a photograph of a tank in the field of sunflowers, shot by a staff photographer for the business daily Kommersant.

The question was whether the photographer had been credited. To demonstrate that he had been, Yabloko’s lawyer spent an extended stretch of the hearing walking court staff through how to save the image and magnify the bottom left corner portion of it bearing the author’s name, Anatoly Zhdanov. The credit was there, and spectators in the courtroom applauded. The judge threatened to have them removed.

The parties then watched an interview with Yabloko’s founder Grigory Yavlinsky, in which the interviewer quotes a line from “May There Always Be Sunshine”, a 1962 song that is one of the best-known pro-peace songs of the Soviet era. The plaintiffs argued the lyric had been used without permission. Yabloko’s representatives said the rights holder had granted the party the right to quote it.

Attention also turned to a drawn portrait of the blogger Victoria Bonya, whose appeal to Vladimir Putin went viral a few months earlier, on the party’s site. The party’s lawyers argued that a drawing is not a photograph and therefore cannot infringe a photographer’s copyright.

The filing further argued that the party had required OpenAI’s permission to place an image generated with ChatGPT on its website—and questioned whether a dove of peace was a copyrighted work.

The filing also argued that Yabloko’s rising visibility online—among political bloggers and influencers—amounted to informational services it should have paid for, at a value exceeding its permitted campaign budget. Rodina alleged that pro-Yabloko content on foreign platforms was distributed by paid “foreign agents”.

The suit also argued that calling for an end to the war amounts to calling for violations of Russia’s territorial integrity, and that statements by Yabloko representatives against political arrests and censorship constitute extremism and incitement of hatred toward the authorities.

The reversal of Yabloko registration came very quickly, not two weeks after its official inclusion on the ballot. In the days since, the party has amassed support online, with Yulia Navalnaya of ACF calling on voters to back their list, and exiled antiwar figures campaigning in support of the party. Alexei Navalny’s associates had historically published their “Smart Voting” recommendations only days before polls opened, specifically so endorsed candidates could not be struck off in time—now the endorsement came way earlier.

Boris Nadezhdin was the only openly antiwar candidate to attempt a run in the 2024 presidential election, with long queues formed to sign his nomination papers before the Central Election Commission refused to register him. This year, he began a Duma campaign, only to be designated a “foreign agent” and fined over a photograph of Alexei Navalny which barred him from the ballot box. He abandoned the campaign and left Russia, filming a short video in front of the Eiffel Tower. After his departure, a Moscow district court registered a further protocol against him, for involvement with an “undesirable” organisation, which meant the interview with Meduza.