The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) has filed a lawsuit with the Sverdlovsk Regional Court seeking to annul the registration of Yabloko's candidate list for the regional legislative elections. The hearing is scheduled for August 28.
The party cites three grounds: Yabloko's use of restricted-access resources (posts on Instagram and Facebook, owned by Meta, a corporation recognized as extremist in Russia), alleged violations of intellectual property law in campaign materials (song fragments and Sberbank trademarks), and exceeding the electoral fund spending limit.
According to Yabloko's calculations, the substantive part of the LDPR lawsuit overlaps 63% with a lawsuit filed by the Communists of Russia party against Yabloko's list in the Kaliningrad region. The overall document match is about 51%. The complaints repeat long paragraphs, arguments, and their sequence, with differences mainly limited to regional names and candidate surnames.
Ivan Bolshakov, head of Yabloko's Analytical Center, said the similarity of the lawsuits indicates coordination of efforts to remove the party's lists at the federal level. According to him, spoiler parties are used for this purpose, and the claims in the lawsuits "have nothing to do with the law."
The Sverdlovsk region is the sixth where attempts are being made to bar Yabloko's list from elections. Earlier, the party was removed from elections in St. Petersburg, Leningrad, Pskov regions, and Karelia. In the Kaliningrad region, the Communists of Russia lawsuit will also be heard on August 28.