This week it emerged that Boris Nadezhdin, who ran for president in 2024, will not be allowed to stand in the State Duma elections. He had planned to run as an independent in the Mytishchi single-mandate district in Moscow Oblast. On July 10, however, he was designated a foreign agent, which automatically disqualifies him from becoming a deputy. An administrative case was subsequently opened against him for “displaying extremist symbols.” He is now barred even from preparing his registration documents.
Nadezhdin, who has always stayed within the system’s accepted limits and pursued a moderate opposition line, is now weighing whether to leave the country. A travel ban has already been issued in his name.
As he did during his 2024 presidential bid, Nadezhdin launched a signature-collection drive. His teams handed out leaflets bearing the single word “Peace.” While the move clearly signaled his parliamentary ambitions, it also showed that he was already adjusting to the system’s unspoken preferences — possibly without any direct coordination. Politically, the most promising option for him would have been one of Moscow’s more protest-oriented districts, where he could have expected a solid result and where signature collection would have generated the kind of visible queues that made his 2024 campaign so noticeable. Instead, he chose the safer, more compromise route of running in Moscow Oblast, where the media impact was bound to be smaller because of lower population density. He cited his long-standing work in the region and his existing local recognition. Yet Moscow Oblast has long functioned as an electoral sultanate, unlike Moscow itself, where tightly managed official results only became the norm relatively recently.
It is possible that Nadezhdin was trying to strike a political bargain by also putting himself forward for the Moscow Oblast Duma. In theory, regional authorities and the Presidential Administration’s political team could have allowed him to campaign for the regional parliament while blocking his federal bid. That kind of maneuver might have worked in the days of Vladislav Surkov or Vyacheslav Volodin. Sergei Kiriyenko’s team, however, has little appetite for such games, and since the start of the full-scale war the old style of political horse-trading has largely disappeared.
The authorities could simply have refused to register Nadezhdin, the usual method for dealing with inconvenient candidates. Instead, they chose a much harsher route. Measures of this kind are typically initiated by the siloviki, who prefer decisive action and place little faith in the “civilian” techniques of electoral filtering. Their logic is straightforward. Despite Nadezhdin’s efforts to keep his campaign low-key, the signature drive was beginning to draw attention. In an otherwise tightly controlled State Duma race, the appearance of a recognizable single-mandate candidate running on a “Peace” platform was turning into a national story. The campaign was therefore shut down in the now-standard way: foreign-agent status plus an administrative case for displaying extremist symbols — the same approach used in recent years against prominent Yabloko and Communist figures.
Whether this operation was coordinated between the siloviki and the Presidential Administration’s political team remains unclear. On one hand, the growing publicity around Nadezhdin’s signature collection was clearly causing headaches for Kiriyenko’s team. On the other, the scandal surrounding his persecution creates its own problems: it sends yet another signal that the authorities are ruthlessly clearing the electoral field because they fear the outcome of the vote. Against a backdrop of rising discontent with the Kremlin and the government, the sidelining of Nadezhdin could generate a louder backlash than a simple refusal to register him would have done. This suggests the siloviki took the lead, with the Presidential Administration’s political team choosing not to push back.
The same political team has been applying comparable pressure to Yabloko and the CPRF. The calculation is obvious: a strong federal Yabloko campaign under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom,” fronted by recognizable figures, could shift public sentiment. That is why weakening the party as much as possible makes sense from the Administration’s perspective. Tellingly, Yabloko was long blocked from appointing its financial proxies and opening a special campaign account during the registration process — steps without which serious campaigning is impossible.
Taken together, the treatment of Nadezhdin and the pressure on Yabloko and the CPRF point to a clear trend: forceful methods are becoming central to Russian politics. The room for maneuver and bargaining that existed in the Surkov-Volodin era has largely closed.
United Russia’s Negative Pragmatism
United Russia is opening its State Duma campaign by leaning heavily into the war. War correspondent Evgeny Poddubny, speaking during pre-election trips, has said the party’s still-unpublished program “will be fully oriented toward the realities of wartime” and has promised extra social and financial support for combatants. General Council Secretary Vladimir Yakushev has sharply criticized anyone calling for negotiations “without achieving the goals of the special military operation.”
Given widespread war fatigue and the public’s clear preference for talks, these statements look counterproductive in conventional political terms. The party’s top official is effectively telling voters there will be no negotiations anytime soon, while Poddubny signals that United Russia’s program is designed for a prolonged wartime footing — in other words, that fighting will continue.
These messages clash with the mood of most Russians and are likely to accelerate the erosion of the party’s real support. Yet they are entirely logical if the goal is to position United Russia as “Putin’s party.” The president has repeatedly rejected Vladimir Zelensky’s proposals for a mutual halt to strikes on rear areas. In almost every public appearance he praises “fighters who keep advancing,” while official propaganda continues to highlight territorial gains, however questionable.
United Russia is operating according to a twisted form of pragmatism that diverges from actual political expediency. By analogy with “negative growth,” it can be called negative pragmatism. Aggressively emphasizing the war theme irritates the majority of people tired of the conflict. At the same time, such rhetoric pleases President Putin. For now, the entire script of United Russia’s campaign is written for a single audience of one: a leader committed to continuing the fighting and further escalation.
