The Appeal Board of the Russian Supreme Court on March 4 rejected anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin’s latest appeal of a Central Election Commission (TsIK) decision to bar him from being registered to run in the March 15-17 presidential election.
The Uzbekistan-born 60-year-old academic and former lawmaker, the only potential candidate who has openly criticized Russia's war against Ukraine, said on Telegram he will appeal the latest court decision as well. Ruling out Nadezhdin leaves President Vladimir Putin without any significant challengers in the vote.
"I do not agree with the board's decision, and therefore, I will file a supervisory complaint with the Supreme Court's Presidium. I am not going to stop. I will fight to the end," Nadezhdin said in a statement on Telegram.
Last month, the Supreme Court rejected two other appeals Nadezhdin lodged over the TsIK’s decision to bar him from the vote. He then filed cases over TsIK decisions related to the collection of signatures on petitions to register his candidacy. The court said that, with its latest ruling, the TsIK's decisions now come into force.
TsIK, which routinely refuses to register would-be opposition candidates on the pretext that they submitted an insufficient number of valid signatures, disqualified thousands of signatures that Nadezhdin's representatives had gathered across the country to reach the 100,000-signature threshold needed to be registered as a candidate.
Nadezhdin, who was proposed as a presidential candidate by the Civic Platform party, is the only politician with presidential ambitions who has publicly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine and criticized Putin.
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 marred by the exclusion of opposition candidates, voter intimidation, ballot-stuffing, and other means of manipulation.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin's tight grip on politics, media, law enforcement, and other levers means Putin, who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 1999, is certain to win.
But the surprising show of support for the little-known Nadezhdin, whose platform calls the invasion of Ukraine a "fatal mistake" and who 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.
Those who were expected to be Putin's main challengers currently are either incarcerated or fled the country, fearing for their safety.
The late Aleksei Navalny was once a leading opposition voice who attempted to run against Putin in 2018, only to be barred by the TsIK over his conviction in a fraud case that was widely seen as politically motivated.
Navalny died in prison on February 16 after he reportedly collapsed while on a daily walk. No official cause of death has been given by the authorities.
Navalny was buried in Moscow on March 1 after authorities refused for almost two weeks to release his body to his family. The move heightened suspicions that the anti-corruption crusader was killed while in prison.