The Domino Fear: Why a 2% Party Threatened Putin’s Endless War in Ukraine

Russia’s Yabloko party was never likely to threaten Vladimir Putin at the ballot box. But it had the potential to become something more dangerous: a place where Russians with very different reasons for wanting the war to end could suddenly find one another.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. For more than four years, Putin’s state has worked to make opposition to the invasion politically invisible. Anti-war politicians have been jailed, excluded from elections or driven abroad. Independent media have been dismantled or forced into exile. Public opposition to the war can bring criminal prosecution. Anti-War Is Not Pro-Ukraine There is a crucial distinction between opposing the war and supporting Ukraine. Yabloko’s blueprint for ending the war has drawn fierce criticism from Kyiv. Its founder, Grigory Yavlinsky, advocates an immediate, unconditional ceasefire that would freeze the current front line, leaving roughly one-fifth of sovereign Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation. Yabloko does not represent Ukraine’s interests, nor is Yavlinsky broadly embraced by Russia’s anti-Putin opposition. But Yabloko had the potential to unite a constituency much broader than its traditional liberal base: soldiers’ relatives, draft-age men frightened of another mobilization, citizens exhausted by casualties, people angered by economic deterioration and Russians who simply no longer see a reason for the war to continue. Other Topics of Interest Ukraine Repels 185 Combat Clashes on Tuesday Pokrovsk saw the heaviest fighting, with 38 Russian troops killed and dozens of vehicles destroyed. Yabloko could have become the institutional container into which those separate forms of discontent flowed. The Belarus lesson and the domino effect The Kremlin appears to have absorbed one of the central lessons of Belarus’s 2020 uprising. Aleksandr Lukashenko allowed Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya onto the presidential ballot and publicly dismissed her as no serious threat. He failed to see that in a closed system, a candidate the regime dismissed as harmless can quickly become a proxy for a mass movement. The Kremlin appears unwilling to run that experiment inside Russia. The immediate reaction to Yabloko’s disqualification showed why. The 2% Party That Drew a Crowd Critics have long ridiculed the party for its roughly 2% level of support, yet hundreds of supporters gathered outside the Supreme Court during the hearing, many of them young, some carrying apples in reference to the party’s name. In today’s Russia, showing up outside a courthouse to support an anti-war political party is not a cost-free gesture. Protesters know the state possesses extensive surveillance and facial-recognition capabilities and has repeatedly used them against political dissent. In 2019, the exclusion of opposition candidates from Moscow city elections brought thousands into the streets and produced one of Russia’s largest sustained protest movements in years. In 2021, Alexei Navalny’s arrest triggered demonstrations across dozens of Russian cities. The Kremlin knows how to suppress a crowd once it forms. What it cannot know is what will trigger it. Allowing Yabloko several more weeks to campaign nationally as the only registered anti-war alternative would have tested something the authorities evidently preferred not to test. Endless war as the foundational ideology This pre-election purge exposes a deeper truth about the evolution of Putinism. For years, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has worked relentlessly to convince Russians that the invasion of Ukraine was not a choice but a necessity – that war was forced on Russia, that there was no alternative, and that refusing to fight would have meant accepting national defeat. Yabloko was offering an alternative vision of Russia’s future – one that does not have to be organized around endless war. The hypocrisy of Putin’s election demands There is a profound irony in Yabloko’s forced disappearance. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly attacked Ukraine’s democratic legitimacy, weaponizing the fact that Kyiv has not held presidential and parliamentary elections while under martial law. National elections cannot be held under Ukraine’s wartime legal framework while martial law remains in force. Moscow demands elections from a country it is actively bombarding while eliminating the only registered option for its own citizens to vote against that very war. Yabloko’s removal demonstrates what the Kremlin itself appears to mean when it lectures others about elections. This is Putin’s vision of an election: there can be ballot boxes, party logos and official results – voting is permitted, provided it has already been decided what you are allowed to choose. Sevinj OsmanqiziSevinj Osmanqizi is an experienced journalist who writes extensively for Kyiv Post on foreign policy, international security and geopolitics. Based in Washington, D.C., her work focuses on Ukraine, Russia’s war and the broader post-Soviet space.