Russian nationalists seek election ban on anti-war party, calling its members ‘traitors’

LONDON: Russia’s Supreme Court said on Friday it would consider a lawsuit to bar Yabloko, the only officially registered party which opposes Moscow’s war in Ukraine, from contesting parliamentary elections in September.

The suit was filed by Rodina, or Motherland, a small pro-Kremlin nationalist party whose leader Alexei Zhuravlev denounced Yabloko as a Western-backed movement bent on discrediting the elections and Russia itself. In a video statement, Zhuravlev declared: “We are rooting out national traitors to ensure they have no place in our country. They belong neither in the State Duma nor in the country at all. We are firmly convinced of this. We will fight and defeat both the external and the internal enemy.”

Even in the context of wartime Russia, where many Kremlin critics have been jailed or forced to flee abroad, the language being used against a registered political party was notably threatening. The case will be considered on Monday.

Yabloko accused Zhuravlev of making defamatory statements against it and said it would launch its own suit to protect its reputation.

“They want to remove us from the elections because we stand for peace, whereas they want to prolong the tragedy (of the war) indefinitely,” Yabloko leader Nikolai Rybakov said on Telegram.