Russian elections rarely turn into an equal contest of programmes, candidates and teams. As a rule, they are structured asymmetrically: some participants are forced to constantly prove their right to campaign, while others conduct theirs under the cover of the administrative machine, budgetary support and a loyal media field.
Formally, the law is the same for everyone. Every candidate has the right to meet with voters, distribute printed materials, place banners, use premises, defend themselves against slander and challenge violations. But in reality, the same action receives a different legal and administrative assessment depending on who performs it.
An opposition candidate spends energy not only on persuading the voter, but also on fighting for the very possibility of running a campaign. A pro-government candidate, by contrast, receives the main advantage — a predictable and friendly environment.
For an independent candidate, any formal error often becomes grounds for sanctions. A typo in the details, a disputed QR code, a costume at an event, an old publication can lead to a fine, arrest, refusal of registration or removal from the election.
Legal errors in campaigning as grounds for removal from elections
Federal Law No. 225-FZ of 05.12.2006 “On Amendments to the Federal Law ‘On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right of Citizens of the Russian Federation to Participate in a Referendum’ and the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation” introduced a ban on the use of extremist symbols in campaigning.
On the one hand, it seems a logical measure — indeed, the last thing campaigning needed was extremism! The problem is that the concept of “extremist symbols” is interpreted extremely broadly, and it encompasses elements of the everyday environment that until recently were not prohibited. The problem became even more complicated after the start of the full-scale war, as a result of which, for example, the company Meta was declared extremist, and consequently the Facebook and Instagram logos belonging to it. Everything connected with Alexei Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation is now also recognised as extremist, including images of Navalny and other foundation staff.
At the Moscow municipal elections in 2022, several Yabloko candidates were detained after visiting territorial commissions. They were charged under Article 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offences for allegedly displaying symbols associated with Alexei Navalny’s projects and “Smart Voting”: a red exclamation mark and a stylised letter “N”.
Sometimes the issue is not candidates’ current campaigning but old publications on social media. A punishment under this article that entered into force deprived a candidate of passive electoral rights for a year, meaning it could be used as a quick legal mechanism for removing someone from a campaign. Yabloko reported that in the 2022 Moscow campaign, of 179 candidates who submitted documents, 141 remained registered by the finish.
In Veliky Novgorod, at the city duma elections in 2023, reports on the display of prohibited symbols were drawn up against Yabloko candidates Valery Kochnev and Oksana Sergeyeva. For Kochnev, the grounds were an old VKontakte post with a clip of the song Zombie by the Cranberries: the video contained newsreel footage of Nazi Germany. Kochnev himself explained that he had published the clip out of anti-fascist convictions. For Sergeyeva, the grounds were photographs with the white-blue-white flag; police considered it the symbol of the Freedom of Russia Legion.
At the Moscow City Duma elections in 2024, prosecution for displaying symbols of Navalny’s projects and “Smart Voting” was common practice. Yabloko candidate Vladimir Kalinin was found guilty of displaying extremist symbols for a 2019 post devoted to elections; the Gagarinsky court fined him 2,000 roubles, and he was not admitted to participate in the elections. In Golos’s report, similar cases are described involving Dmitry Loktev and Igor Sukhanov: logos or symbols of banned structures were found in old posts, and an administrative case became a quick way to remove a candidate from the campaign.
Online as on the street
Federal Law No. 43-FZ of 09.03.2021 “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation” extended all requirements for offline campaigning to the internet. The law was passed by the votes of United Russia; the entire parliamentary opposition voted against it in a consolidated manner.
The new norms assume that any website or social media channel where a candidate talks about themselves, or where someone talks about them, must be registered with the election commission as a campaigning platform. Many opposition candidates were unaware of exactly how this norm works.
For example, in Vladivostok in 2023, CPRF candidate Alexander Khamadullin was removed from the elections after a lawsuit by United Russia candidate Stanislav Primachenko. The grounds were a QR code on a banner that led to a publication in a Telegram channel with an invitation to debates; the publication was accompanied by a picture depicting little figures and the word Debate, for which, in Primachenko’s opinion, the CPRF candidate did not hold the copyright. As a result, a technical element of offline campaigning — a QR code — became grounds for the removal of the candidate from the elections.
At the elections of deputies to the State Council of the Udmurt Republic of the seventh convocation in 2022, the Ustinovsky TEC of the city of Izhevsk recognised a post on a candidate’s personal VKontakte page as illegal campaigning. The matter concerned a publication by Dmitry Begishev with the headline: “New faces, but old methods!” The commission assessed the content as campaigning and applied the requirements to the post: before making it publicly available, the candidate had to submit screenshots of the campaign material to the commission, as well as information about the producer and the commissioning party. After that, the TEC sent a submission to Roskomnadzor to stop the distribution of the publication and appealed to the police demanding that the responsible person be prosecuted under Article 5.12 of the Code of Administrative Offences.
In the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, at the by-elections of a deputy to the Assembly of Deputies in 2019, a court treated a VKontakte publication as full-fledged distribution of campaign material. The image was posted in the open community “CPRF NAO”, and the court stressed: what matters is not whether the page is a media outlet, but that the material is accessible to an indefinite circle of persons.
In 2024, the Supreme Court separately entrenched this logic, stating that the production and distribution of campaign materials, including on the internet, in violation of the requirements of the law entails liability under Part 1 of Article 5.12 of the Code of Administrative Offences.
Street campaigning under separate regulation
Electoral legislation contains no direct ban on participants in election campaigning concealing their faces. Meanwhile, such a ban was introduced into the law on mass events by Federal Law No. 65-FZ of 8 June 2012 “On Amendments to the Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation and the Federal Law ‘On Assemblies, Rallies, Demonstrations, Marches and Pickets’”.
In Kurgan, at the elections of deputies to the Kurgan City Duma of the eighth convocation in 2024, candidates from the Party of Pensioners were removed from the electoral list after a street event where campaigners wore dinosaur costumes. The formal argument was that the participants concealed their faces.
Let us note that equating street campaigning with a mass event is an arbitrary practice, not directly established by any law. A similar event by New People with elephant costumes attracted the attention of neither election commissions nor law enforcement. This is one of the most vivid examples of administrative arbitrariness: of two practically identical events, one is for some reason decided to be considered a “mass event” (with all the prohibitions associated with it applied), while the other is not considered one.
Novosibirsk, city council elections 2020. Reports were drawn up under Part 2 of Article 20.2 of the Code of Administrative Offences against registered candidates of the independent coalition “Novosibirsk 2020”, Alexandra Popova and Sergei Boiko, for organising an unsanctioned event. The grounds were the installation of a campaign cube with campaign slogans — police decided that even campaign material approved by the election commission required approval from the mayor’s office as a mass event. The court later returned the reports to the police, but the mechanism itself is telling: an ordinary campaign cube was considered in the context not of electoral law but of the law on public events.
Formally, Russian legislation retains the notification procedure for holding public events. However, Law No. 54-FZ of 2004 already built into it a procedure for agreeing the place and time with the authorities. After the adoption of the aforementioned Federal Law No. 65-FZ of 8 June 2012, this procedure acquired an even more pronounced permissive character: the authorities gained more opportunities to restrict venues for events, propose alternative sites and punish any deviation from the agreed conditions.
In Krasnodar, at the elections to the Legislative Assembly of Krasnodar Krai in 2022, CPRF candidate Ivan Kalashnikov was detained in central Krasnodar while campaigning with a cube; the cube was seized, and a report was drawn up against the candidate under Part 1 of Article 20.2 of the Code of Administrative Offences. Earlier, CPRF candidates had submitted notifications of rallies, but the administration did not approve them, citing that the venues were occupied, and proposed an alternative in a park 11 km from the district. Here again the same conflation is visible: campaigning with a cube is treated as a public event, and access to a convenient public location is blocked through the approval procedure.
Who pays for the banquet
The basic Federal Law No. 67-FZ of 12 June 2002 “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights and the Right of Citizens of the Russian Federation to Participate in a Referendum” has, since its very appearance, prohibited the distribution of campaigning without the candidate’s imprint and without payment from the electoral fund.
Opposition candidates do not even try to print campaign materials in circumvention of this norm — such a violation would almost certainly lead to removal from registration. However, for approved candidates, in this sense, the law is literally “not written”.
At the elections of deputies to the City Duma of Krasnodar in 2015, the election commission refused to recognise the “1+10” booklet of the United Russia party as campaign material. The argument was that the material allegedly contained no information about the current campaign and was intended only for employees of the party’s local executive committees, although observers pointed to facts of its free distribution. For any opposition headquarters, such a situation would have entailed the removal of the list, but for the party of power it was considered “lawful”.
Spoiler candidates: technologies of confusion
The authorities widely use the spoiler method, which is not regulated by any legislation. The essence of the method: registering and including on the ballot candidates who are somewhat similar to opposition ones, and whom the voter in the voting booth may simply confuse with the real oppositionist.
Spoilers may be namesakes, candidates with deliberately changed names, visual doubles, representatives of close ideological niches or clone parties. All of them are registered by election commissions in compliance with formal procedures. In practice, the voter is offered a ballot in which confusion is deliberately created in order to split protest votes.
The most famous example is the 2021 elections in St Petersburg, when two more Boris Vishnevskys were registered against the Yabloko politician Boris Vishnevsky. Two candidates officially changed their first and last names shortly before the elections and also “tweaked” their appearance, becoming visually similar to the real Vishnevsky. The complaint about the ballots with doubles was rejected, despite the public resonance and comments by the head of the CEC. It must be admitted — despite the obvious maliciousness of nominating such spoilers against Vishnevsky, there were no legal grounds for removing them from the elections.
In 2021, spoiler technology was also used against CPRF candidates in the State Duma elections. In Moscow districts, namesakes of communists or candidates with very similar first and last names appeared: for example, in Vitaly Petrov’s district, Vasily Petrov ran, and in the district where Ivan Ulyanchenko stood for the CPRF, there were Ivan Ulyanov and Sergei Ulyanov.
Let us note that after these stories the legislation was amended. Federal Law No. 60-FZ of 14 March 2022 directly added a rule to the norms on the ballot: if a candidate changed their surname, first name or patronymic during the campaign period or within a year before the election was called, their previous full name is indicated on the ballot. Which, however, is far from fully eliminating the problem.
At the 2018 presidential elections, the spoiler mechanics manifested differently — not through surnames but through an ideological niche. At that time, CPRF candidate Pavel Grudinin gained great popularity. To dilute his electorate, Sergei Baburin (Russian All-People’s Union) and Maxim Suraykin (“Communists of Russia”) were nominated. They work in a close left-patriotic field, while their sharp criticism during the campaign was directed primarily at Grudinin, not at Vladimir Putin. Therefore, many commentators viewed their nomination precisely as a variant of spoiling — a way to draw votes away from Pavel Grudinin.
Covid law enforcement: a sanitary ban versus managed mobilisation
With the onset of the 2020 pandemic, Federal Law No. 98-FZ of 01.04.2020 “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation on the Prevention and Elimination of Emergency Situations” was adopted. This law introduced the concept of a “high-alert regime”, which imposes a number of significant restrictions on citizens’ rights, including in the context of campaigning.
Formally, the matter concerned protecting citizens’ health. In fact, a dual practice emerged in public politics: for opposition, anti-war, civic and regional initiatives, covid became a universal grounds for refusing rallies, pickets and meetings with voters; for events of the authorities and pro-government mobilisation, sanitary bans are usually not applied.
The restrictions provided for by the “high-alert regime” were introduced by decrees of the heads of federal subjects and resolutions of regional governments and were fully in force from 2020 to mid-2022.
Even while the high-alert regime was in force, it was applied selectively: for example, to ban anti-war rallies; at the same time, there were no restrictions on events organised by the authorities. For example, on 18 March 2022, a large-scale rally-concert in support of the war, timed to the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, took place at Luzhniki, at which Vladimir Putin spoke. According to the capital’s main interior ministry directorate, more than 203,000 people were at the event: over 95,000 in the stadium and more than 100,000 next to it.
Starting from 2 July 2022, the ban on holding mass events was “relaxed” but not fully lifted. This allowed regional authorities to ban events inconvenient to them with absolute arbitrariness, including protest actions and opposition campaigning during elections. In Ivanovo Oblast in 2023, officials repeatedly refused to approve campaign events of the CPRF and the New People party: pickets and motor rallies were blocked with reference to the decree on the high-alert regime adopted back during the coronavirus restrictions.
“Covid” restrictions remain in force even in 2026. For example, because of them, actions for a free internet and against messenger blockings were banned — events that essentially opened Boris Nadezhdin’s State Duma election campaign. Nadezhdin’s supporters submitted applications for rallies in five large cities of Moscow Oblast: Krasnogorsk, Khimki, Dolgoprudny, Mytishchi and Korolyov. All received refusals; the administrations’ replies cited the decree of the governor of Moscow Oblast of 12 March 2020 banning mass events due to coronavirus. In Moscow, an application for a rally against internet blockings was also not approved, with reference to the “epidemiological situation” and the mayor’s 2020 decree. The obvious absurdity of these bans does not in the least hinder their practical effectiveness.
In the pro-government circuit, the sanitary logic worked differently. Back in 2020, when covid restrictions were genuinely necessary, the “Young Guard of United Russia” held an open dance masterclass in Yoshkar-Ola that was in fact part of the campaign for supplementary municipal elections. This event was not banned, although at the same time, because of the high-alert regime, the Mari branch of the LDPR was refused permission to hold a rally in support of Khabarovsk residents and the arrested former governor Sergei Furgal.