Russia’s Supreme Court disqualified the only antiwar party over copyright, campaign financing, and a picture from ChatGPT — without ever ruling on whether calls for peace are extremism

On August 10, Russia’s Supreme Court barred Yabloko — the only party in the race campaigning for peace with Ukraine — from the State Duma elections. The formal pretext was a lawsuit from the Rodina party, which accused Yabloko of numerous violations of election law: copyright infringement, incitement to extremism, and “gray-area” campaigning. It was unclear which of those claims the Supreme Court accepted and which it rejected, because the ruling was not made public. But on August 12, several Russian media outlets and Yabloko itself summarized the substance of the ruling. In short, the court agreed with most of Rodina’s claims. Yabloko says it will appeal.

Are calls for peace extremism? Not yet.

Rodina’s lawsuit branded two of Yabloko’s positions extremist. The first was its antiwar stance, on the grounds that peace with Ukraine would keep Russia from “liberating” the Donbas, a region Russia has already declared its own but has not yet fully captured. The second was the party’s opposition to the crackdown on the LGBTQ community, on the grounds that a Russian court has banned the nonexistent “international LGBT movement.”

The Supreme Court did not accept these accusations — not because it found them absurd, but because it did not consider them at all. Those claims could be decided only in separate proceedings, the judge said.

Does using an image from ChatGPT violate copyright? Yes.

Alleged copyright violations in Yabloko’s campaign materials made up the bulk of Rodina’s lawsuit, and the court agreed with many of those claims. It found that the party had infringed copyright by using the Soviet-era lines “Let there always be sunshine” and “If only there were no war,” as well as Levada Center polling results and an image from ChatGPT. In each case, the court’s view was that Yabloko should have obtained the rights holders’ consent.

The court saw nothing wrong, however, with Yabloko’s decision to post on its website a photograph of Hiroshima taken after the 1945 atomic bombing, without noting that the image belongs to the U.S. Army — the same army that dropped the bomb. More than 80 years have passed since the photograph was published, according to the ruling, so the image can now be used freely.

The Supreme Court also rejected the claim that Yabloko’s logo is a modified version of El Lissitzky’s poster “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.” And the judge took no issue with the images of a peace dove in Yabloko’s campaign materials: the party produced a contract commissioning the artwork.

Is mass support on banned social media a “gray-area” campaign scheme? Yes.

In its lawsuit, Rodina said that thousands of posts supporting Yabloko appeared on social media after the Central Election Commission registered the party’s candidate list. Some of them spread on networks that are blocked in Russia and through people and projects that the Russian authorities have designated “foreign agents.”

Rodina saw signs of campaigning in the posts and, for some reason, decided that Yabloko had paid for them — and had done so outside its campaign fund. The lawsuit offered no evidence, and Yabloko’s lawyers denied the claim. “The party did not approve or commission these publications. It did not transfer any money,” they said at the hearing.

The court sided with Rodina all the same and, in particular, said that Yabloko certainly could not have paid for posts on blocked social networks from its campaign fund. “The court made no comment whatsoever on the defense’s argument that social media users and media outlets published these posts on their own initiative,” Yabloko said.

Do ruble transfers from people who received money from abroad count as a violation? Yes.

In court, the Central Election Commission presented a report from Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service, known as Rosfinmonitoring, indicating that Yabloko had received money from people who had themselves received funds from abroad. In all, Rosfinmonitoring identified 74 people among the party’s donors and who received 80 million rubles from 310 foreign entities from 2023 to 2026.

Yabloko’s representatives said in court that if the party’s donors received money from abroad, it would not automatically make the party foreign-funded. A person could, for instance, sell foreign shares, collect the proceeds, and then donate out of Russian income.

By their account, the party received just 16,900 rubles in donations that failed to meet election law requirements, and it returned the money to the senders. But the court found that no evidence of those refunds had been submitted.