The regional branch of the Yabloko party said the commissions held emergency sessions on September 16 and annulled the registrations of three State Duma candidates and two candidates for the regional legislature.
The Duma candidates were Konstantin Kiselev, head of the Yabloko faction in the Yekaterinburg city duma; Vladimir Sobyanin, a member of the party's regional council; and Vladimir Sevostyanov, a deputy in the duma of the town of Sukhoy Log. Shana Ogney and Alexander Kudelkin were running for the regional parliament.
Days earlier the candidates had been detained and issued protocols under Part 1 of Article 20.3 of the Administrative Code, which covers the display of extremist symbols. Kiselev and Ogney were fined 2,000 rubles each, while Kudelkin, Sevostyanov and Sobyanin received administrative arrests. The grounds were publications and reposts on social media.
The Sverdlovsk Regional Court heard appeals against those decisions on September 15 and 16. It reviewed the complaints against the fines for Kiselev and Ogney on September 15, and against the arrests of Kudelkin, Sobyanin and Sevostyanov on September 16. The first-instance rulings were upheld, meaning all five will be barred from participating in elections for a year.
Kiselev was accused of displaying the letter "N" stylized as an exclamation mark, which security services deemed a symbol of "Navalny's headquarters," as well as a photo of a poster reading "Freedom for Navalny!" and a photo of graffiti reading "Freedom for Pussy Riot!" Ogney was fined over Twitter posts with images containing pentagrams and symbols of the Vesna movement.
According to the party, the removed candidates and the party's regional list have already been printed on the ballots, and the lines with their names will be struck out by hand by members of precinct election commissions. The party described the events as the result of a "special operation" by law enforcement, courts, prosecutors and regional election commissions to remove both the 71-candidate list and the five single-mandate candidates.
Yabloko still has 14 single-mandate candidates for the regional legislature and three for the State Duma in the Sverdlovsk region. Elections to the State Duma, as well as to the legislatures of 39 regions and for the heads of eight regions, will be held on September 18-20.