(Adnkronos) – The State Duma candidate for the seat assigned in Moscow’s Babushkinsky constituency, Green Party member Yulia Kuznetsova, who holds anti-war positions in Ukraine, has been missing since yesterday, after a meeting with her supporters in Sokolniki. “Since yesterday evening, she has not answered her phone,” denounces the NGO ‘Slovo Zashchite’ (Word to Defense) after at least 36 ‘strong’ candidates for the legislative elections, which began this morning at the federal level, as well as for regional and municipal elections, have been forced to withdraw due to judicial rulings in recent weeks.
The last person she spoke to last night said she was in a taxi with her husband about fifteen minutes from home. According to sources close to her, she may have been stopped by the police. Her husband’s phone briefly reactivated this morning, but no one answered. Even the polling station observers she had recommended as a candidate were removed from the ballot boxes. Before running for the State Duma, she had worked on Boris Nadezhdin’s election campaign and had run for the Moscow Duma in 2024.
Ilya Boronina, a candidate in the Udmurt Republic for the State Duma, was forced to withdraw her candidacy after, with an almost identical pattern for everyone, the regional Supreme Court upheld the appeal filed by the Just Russia party, which denounced the violation of copyright rules for the non-payment of rights for the use of the song “Bad to the Bone” in one of her campaign videos published on VKontakte, a payment that can only be made in dollars, thus impossible at the moment from a Russian account. Boronina was not summoned to the hearing and received no notification.
Boronina is one of 29 candidates for Yabloko’s single-mandate constituencies, a systemic but anti-war party also disqualified from list voting at the federal level and in several regions, forced to backtrack. Boronina is the leader of the Udmurtia party. As of yesterday, only 106 Yabloko candidates remained in contention for constituencies in 45 regions, compared to 135 at the start of the campaign. Party candidates remain in the competition in only one region, for the election of the legislative assembly (they were originally in 39), after the disqualification of lists in seven regions and disqualifications of candidates in single-mandate constituencies.
At least eight candidates from the Communist Party, a systemic party favorable to the war, for the State Duma or for regional legislative assemblies, have been forced to withdraw, according to the independent news site Vyorstka. The most prominent of these is Nikolai Bondarenko, a former deputy in the Saratov region with two million YouTube subscribers, a case that ignited social media. His candidacy in the constituency considered the stronghold of the outgoing Duma Speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin, was canceled after a TV debate he participated in saw a peak in audience. The official reason is a post with an old photo of him with Aleksei Navalny. Other Communist Party figures have faced very strong pressure in regions where the political force is strong, such as Altai.
