Ilya Yashin calls for voting against United Russia in Russian legislative elections

Even if the outcome of the vote seems a foregone conclusion, Ilya Iachine wants to seize the opportunity of the legislative elections to make the voice of the opposition to Vladimir Putin heard. This Kremlin critic, who has lived in exile for several years, calls on all “Russians opposed to the war” in Ukraine to vote against the Russian president’s party.

His initiative, called “Noon for Peace”, aims to encourage all voters both in Russia and abroad to go to the polls on September 20 at that time in their respective countries.

Noon, time for Putin’s opponents

“If people all come to vote against “United Russia” (the party that supports the government) at the same time and queue up, then the world will see how many of us there really are,” underlines Ilya Yashin, who lives in Berlin, in an interview with AFP in Helsinki. A similar action was organized in 2024, the day of the Russian presidential election.

There is not the slightest doubt about the victory of United Russia. The Russian authorities have in fact exercised strict control over the electoral process for years and human rights defenders have highlighted the fraud orchestrated at the time of the polls.

Above all, repression has reached levels in Russia not seen since the end of the Soviet era after the outbreak of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Thousands of people have been imprisoned or fined for denouncing this conflict. The main opposition figures are incarcerated, in exile or dead and demonstrations against the Kremlin are almost non-existent.

Anti-war party banned from running

Last month, the Russian Supreme Court prevented the only party opposed to this war, Yabloko, from running in the next legislative elections. “We don’t even consider this an election,” confides Ilya Iachine.

This forty-year-old, a close ally of the late opponent Alexeï Navalny, is at the head of a party founded in June in the German capital which has given itself the mission of bringing together the various Russian opposition groups – long undermined by internal struggles – in order to call for an end to hostilities in Ukraine and to defend human rights. He expects thousands of people to join the action he is calling for in late September.

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An active activist in the liberal opposition in Russia since the 2000s, Ilya Iachine was sentenced at the end of 2022 to eight years in prison for rebelling against “the murder of civilians” in the Ukrainian town of Boutcha during the Russian assault. He was released two years later during a historic prisoner exchange between Russia and the West.