Putin’s antiwar rival blocked from contesting Russia presidential election
Al Jazeera
Boris Nadezhdin, who has won support for his criticism of the Ukraine war, vows to challenge poll commission’s decision.
Russia’s presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin has said his bid to run in elections in March has been blocked, and that he will challenge the decision of the election commission in the country’s highest court.
Nadezhdin, a prominent critic of the war in Ukraine, is intent on unseating incumbent Vladimir Putin. But his bid was stymied by the Central Election Commission (CEC), which refused to register him as a candidate, he said on Thursday on Telegram, adding that he would launch an appeal in the country’s Supreme Court.
Running on the ticket of the small centre-right Civic Initiative party, Nadezhdin last month submitted the 100,000 signatures required to register as a candidate for the election to be held on March 15-17.
However, the CEC had informed Nadezhdin on Monday that it had found flaws in 15 percent of signatures he had collected in support of his candidacy, and that some of the purported signatures were those of dead people.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that the decision by election officials was in line with the rules.
