Russia’s Central Election Commission (TsIK) has said it has found irregularities in some of the paperwork submitted by presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin, putting in peril the bid of the only politician in the March election who has openly called for a halt to Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
Nikolai Bulayev, deputy chairman of the commission, told reporters in Moscow on February 2 that some of the signatures Nadezhdin submitted were allegedly those of dead people, and that he had been summoned to appear next week.
Thousands had lined up across Russia to support the 60-year-old academic born in Uzbekistan, putting him well over the 100,000-signature threshold.
Nadezhdin has been supported by associates of imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and self-exiled opposition figures Maksim Kats and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, even though expectations are that the vote will be easily won by incumbent Vladimir Putin, who has led Russia as president or prime minister since 1999.
Still, Bulayev's comments questioning the signatures could be a sign that Nadezhdin will be disqualified from running.
The TsIK routinely refuses to register would-be opposition candidates on the pretext that they submitted an insufficient number of valid signatures, the entire signature process forming a kind of filter against unwelcome developments.
"You and I are the most alive of the living. If someone imagines they see dead souls in my signature lists -- well, friends, that is not a question for me. It's more for the church, or an exorcist," Nadezhdin said on Telegram after Bulayev's statement.
The TsIK has 10 days from when Nadezhdin submitted his application -- January 31 -- to evaluate the signatures for authenticity and decide whether or not he will be allowed to run for president.
Putin, who has held power as president or prime minister since 1999, was officially registered as a candidate earlier this week -- and approved almost immediately -- for a vote he is expected to win easily, with most of his main opponents in jail or outside the country, having fled for security concerns.
Russian elections are tightly controlled by the Kremlin and are neither free nor fair but are viewed by the government as necessary to convey a sense of legitimacy. They are mangled by the exclusion of opposition candidates, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and other means of manipulation.
In mid-November, Putin signed into law a bill on amendments to the law on presidential elections that restricts coverage of the poll, while also giving the TsIK the right to change the election procedure in territories where martial law has been introduced.
The Kremlin's tight grip on politics, media, law enforcement, and other levers nationwide means Putin is certain to win, barring a very big, unexpected development.
But the surprising show of support for the little-known Nadezhdin, whose platform says the invasion of Ukraine was a "fatal mistake" and accuses Putin of dragging Russia into the past instead of building a sustainable future, is complicating the Kremlin's more aggressive ambition of boosting the perception of Putin's legitimacy.
In December, officials disqualified journalist Yekaterina Duntsova, who also spoke out against the war and called for a "humane" Russia, citing alleged technical mistakes in her application to register as a candidate. After her disqualification, Duntsova called on supporters to back Nadezhdin and pledged to work for his campaign.