Russia bars candidate Boris Nadezhdin, who campaigned to end Ukraine war, from election

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In the 25th year of Vladimir Putin’s rule, it was the tiniest flicker of dissent: thousands of people lining up in cities around Russia in the middle of January to add their signatures to a petition supporting an opposition candidate in next month’s presidential elections.

They stood in line not because they had any real hope that their candidate, Boris Nadezhdin – a name few had heard before he announced his presidential bid in December – could win. Everyone in Russia and beyond knows the March 17 election is a sham that will end the way the Kremlin wants it to: with Mr. Putin installed for yet another six-year term.

The voters – some 105,000 of them, according to Mr. Nadezhdin’s team – nonetheless flocked to his regional campaign offices because it was one of the few permissible ways to show they disagree with Mr. Putin and the war he launched against neighbouring Ukraine. Protesting more openly is a quick way to get sent to jail or perhaps even the front line.

On Thursday, the Kremlin swatted away even that tiny display of disobedience, disqualifying Mr. Nadezhdin on the basis that 15 per cent of the signatures he had gathered had been found to be invalid. Candidates without the backing of a major political party needed to demonstrate support from 100,000 voters by the end of January to be allowed onto the presidential ballot.

The disqualification was hardly a shock – rejecting opposition candidates on technical grounds and clearing the field for Mr. Putin and his United Russia party is what the country’s Central Election Commission is best known for. It would have been more surprising if the Kremlin had allowed Mr. Nadezhdin’s candidacy to stand.

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On Wednesday, Mr. Nadezhdin published photos on his Telegram channel that appeared to show that at least some of the problems with his supporters’ signatures cited by the election commission had actually been introduced by the bureaucrats themselves. Several signatures were ruled invalid because the names and addresses didn’t match, but it turned out officials had made spelling errors while typing up the handwritten originals.

However, Mr. Nadezhdin’s attempts to prove the signatures were valid were rejected. With all serious opposition figures either jailed or in exile, the way is now open for Mr. Putin’s recoronation. The three other candidates allowed onto the presidential ballot are all in fact supporters of Mr. Putin and the war in Ukraine.

“You are not denying me, but tens of millions of people who hope for change,” Mr. Nadezhdin said via his Telegram channel shortly after the election commission announced its verdict Thursday. He said he had filed an appeal.

It’s unclear what Mr. Putin intends to do with another six years in office, though there have been widespread rumours of a major offensive in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine being launched ahead of election day. Mr. Putin has ruled Russia as President or Prime Minister since 1999 and oversaw changes to the country’s constitution four years ago that will allow him to run for office again in 2030.

Mr. Nadezhdin, a 60-year-old veteran of Russia’s opposition movement, has called the war in Ukraine a “disastrous mistake” and said he would end the conflict and seek “normal” ties with the West if he were to defeat Mr. Putin.

Perhaps seeking to court Russia’s large bloc of nationalist voters, Mr. Nadezhdin has been vague about what kind of peace he’d seek with Ukraine. In an interview this week with Novaya Gazeta Europe, he said that, if elected, he would propose an immediate ceasefire and peace talks and halt the mobilization of new recruits.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, however, has said peace talks can only begin after all Russian troops have left Ukraine – something Mr. Nadezhdin didn’t commit to.

The details of his peace plan were never likely to matter, with opinion polls suggesting that nearly 80 per cent of Russians plan to vote for Mr. Putin. But a surge in support for Mr. Nadezhdin – from 2 per cent in the middle of January to just over 10 per cent in one poll conducted at the end of the month – created enough unease that the Kremlin decided to shut the insurgency down.

“I think neither the Kremlin, nor the opposition, expected this. … I think he has accomplished a lot by energizing antiwar community, which saw itself as a formidable force,” said Vladimir Ashurkov, the exiled head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation founded by jailed Putin critic Alexey Navalny.

Another achievement of Mr. Nadezhdin’s aborted campaign was to briefly unite Russia’s fractured democratic opposition. Among those who endorsed Mr. Nadezhdin’s candidacy were former political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former chess champion Garry Kasparov, Mr. Navalny’s wife, Yelena, and his top aides.

“He dared to run, which no one else did. So he became a symbol, a crystallization point, of this huge, as we see, demand for any sort of alternative,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist living and working in exile as a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, said of Mr. Nadezhdin’s candidacy.

Defying Mr. Putin’s Kremlin often comes with a high price. Mr. Navalny was sent to the isolation cell in his Arctic prison on Feb. 1, shortly after calling on his supporters via social media to demonstrate their opposition to Mr. Putin by arriving at polling stations en masse at exactly noon on voting day. Other key opposition figures, including Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin, have also been jailed, and Mr. Nadezhdin was a close friend of Boris Nemtsov, a Putin opponent who was murdered outside the Kremlin walls in 2015.

An antiwar candidate finishing second with a significant share of the vote would be a “huge” development in Russian politics, said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the R. Politik political analysis firm. “It would be considered as proof that Russian society is divided, and there is not 99 per cent consolidation of the Russian people, as Putin said recently.”

The unexpected strength of his campaign has been an embarrassment for Sergei Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s domestic policy czar. Mr. Nadezhdin had served as an aide to Mr. Kiriyenko during the latter’s brief stint as prime minister in 1998.

“The idea probably was ‘What harm could old Borya do?’ Who in his or her proper sense will seriously support or take risks for Boris Nadezhdin? He’s not new. He’s not charismatic. So he must be harmless. Let him try, along with others, to collect the necessary number of signatures. Of course, he will fail,” said Ms. Schulmann.

“It was a mistake, because they had allowed this picture of queues in the snow to appear – and they cannot be unseen, they cannot be forgotten. There were no visible lines to sign up for the President. The signature collecting booths that were put up in malls and at transport stops were later removed because no one came near them and it looked pathetic.”