The Sverdlovsk Regional Court disqualified the Yabloko party's regional list from the legislative assembly election, responding to a lawsuit filed by the regional branch of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). Judge Maxim Starkov issued the ruling, marking the first instance in the current campaign where a party holding seats in both the State Duma and the regional parliament pursued such a legal challenge.
The plaintiff, Ural-based lawyer Andrei Yelantsev, argued that Yabloko candidates published campaign news and conducted agitation on Facebook and Instagram, social networks blocked in Russia, thereby gaining an "unjustified advantage." According to LDPR calculations, posts about the party collectively drew 180 million views.
Another claim cited violations of intellectual property law. The plaintiff pointed to the use of logos belonging to Sber, Sber Pay, and Ozon Bank in a pinned post containing instructions on how to support the party, as well as the quoting of the song "May There Always Be Sunshine" in an interview with Grigory Yavlinsky — a point previously referenced by the Supreme Court when it revoked the registration of Yabloko's federal list for the State Duma elections. Additionally, LDPR alleged campaign expenditures of 27.8 million rubles against a limit of 10 million, and 2.8 million rubles in donations from foreign sources.
Yabloko representatives pushed for a postponement of the hearings, citing incomplete access to case materials, and for the case to be transferred to the Moscow City Court, but the court rejected both motions. During the proceedings, the defense displayed screenshots of LDPR posts on the same blocked social networks, as well as an interview with poet Lev Oshanin in which he recounts that the lines "May There Always Be Sunshine" were written not by him but by a four-year-old boy. Konstantin Kiselyov, a Yabloko deputy in the Yekaterinburg City Duma, cited his own tattoo reading "To Eternal Peace" as an example of the claims' absurdity, noting that by the plaintiffs' logic it could infringe on the rights of Immanuel Kant or font authors.
The party said the court's decision has not entered into force and will be appealed. This marks the fifth region where Yabloko's list was barred from regional parliamentary elections: lists were removed by court order in Karelia and the Pskov Oblast, while in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast the election commission refused registration. Registered lists remain in the Novgorod, Kaliningrad, and Tomsk oblasts. In the Kaliningrad Oblast, the Communists of Russia party demanded that Yabloko be stripped of registration — its lawsuit is 51% verbatim identical to the text of the Sverdlovsk LDPR branch's claim. Yabloko is the only party participating in the elections that opposes the war in Ukraine.