As this Fall’s State Duma elections approach, the domestic jockeying for power is heating up in Russia. The latest political salvo came earlier this month, when the nationalist Rodina party filed a lawsuit with Russia’s Supreme Court to disqualify the Yabloko faction from eligibility in the political contest.
Its argument? That Russia’s oldest liberal party was effectively a seditious foreign agent. “The Yabloko party is full of traitors. These are people who work for the West and hold Western values,” Rodina leader Alexei Zhuravlyov told reporters.
Kremlin authorities seem to concur. Just days later, on August 10th, Russia’s Supreme Court took Rodina’s suggestion and formally barred Yabloko from participating in next month’s elections.
The episode is deeply telling. After all, elections in Russia have become decidedly pro forma affairs in recent years, carefully stage-managed to deliver the results the Kremlin wants while preserving a veneer of political pluralism. Moreover, Yabloko has been a marginal political force for years, and is hardly in a position to pose a serious challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party. So why the ban?
In a word, the answer is Ukraine. Russia’s full-scale invasion of its western neighbor, now in its fifth year, is increasingly coming home to ordinary Russians in a number of key ways.
Most directly, Ukrainian long-range drone strike capabilities have brought the war deep into Russian territory. In recent weeks, Kyiv has intensified its attacks on refineries, pipelines, storage facilities and other key infrastructure nodes. This has wreaked havoc on the country’s energy sector and disrupted the oil and gas revenues that serve as the lifeblood of the Kremlin’s war effort. The situation has become so bad that Russia – normally one of the world’s leading energy exporters – is now facing severe nationwide gas shortages, leading to rationing in its assorted regions and mounting local discontent.
Economically, too, President Vladimir Putin’s war of choice has put the country on a path of protracted decline. To be sure, following the February 2022 invasion, Russia proved considerably more economically resilient than many in the West had predicted. But the Kremlin’s progressive embrace of a wartime economy has nonetheless led to major distortions, including rising inflation acute labor shortages, leaving the country in an increasingly precarious fiscal state.
Nor can Russians count on a “rainy day” fund the way they once could. Moscow has progressively drawn down the readily-fungible assets of its National Wealth Fund to cover wartime expenses and ballooning budget deficits. As a result, “Russia’s war chest, if it ever existed, has long been empty,” a study by the Bank of Finland concluded earlier this year. Because of this state of affairs, Russia’s Central Bank has been forced to increasingly sell off the country’s gold reserves in order to plug widening holes in the federal budget.
Then there is the question of manpower. To date, Moscow has relied on troops from foreign locales (like Africa and North Korea), loath to repeat the experience of its last military mobilization – which, when it took place in late 2022, caused the largest exodus of Russians from the country since the Bolshevik Revolution. But rumors now abound that the Kremlin is mulling another mass mobilization later this year, when the elections are safely in the rearview mirror, and that possibility is sure to be causing consternation among many.
Cumulatively, these trends have increasingly threatened the quiet compact that has helped sustain the conflict, and Putin’s popularity, thus far: that the Russian president’s war of choice would remain a distant affair that wouldn’t affect the daily lives of ordinary citizens. More and more, Russians are understanding this is simply not the case.
As such, September’s election is shaping up to be at least a symbolic referendum on the war – and on Putin’s leadership. Indeed, as the Washington Post lays out, “Yabloko [had] campaigned under the slogan ‘For Peace and Freedom,’ a clear counter to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s push for conquest in Ukraine.”
That, in turn, made Russia’s remaining liberals a domestic political target, because as the consequences of its adventurism increasingly come home, even the potential for limited dissent has become a threat to the Kremlin’s preferred worldview.