Nikolai Rybakov, leader of Yabloko: “There can be no victory in Ukraine. We have all already lost”

Russians elect a new State Duma on 18–20 September. Every party still on the ballot supports the war in Ukraine. Yabloko, the only registered party that opposed the war outright, was struck off the party list. The Supreme Court accepted a complaint from the nationalist party Rodina alleging foreign funding, copyright violations and the promotion of “extremism.” Yabloko appealed; the court stood by its ruling. The Central Election Commission printed a revised ballot without the party.

Russia bars Yabloko from election, shutting out its only registered anti-war party

Yabloko still has about 119 single-mandate candidates. Sixteen already registered have been dropped. In Sverdlovsk region six were detained for displaying “extremist” symbols – old posts with photographs of Alexei Navalny. The party is campaigning under the slogan “For peace and freedom” and has told supporters to avoid electronic voting and go to polling stations on 20 September to spoil the party-list ballot.

Alina Zibrițchi’s from EUalive’s partner PressOne spoke to Yabloko leader Nikolai Rybakov.

Beyond the Supreme Court’s public arguments, what is your explanation? Why was the contest blocked?

We were excluded because Yabloko is the only pacifist party in Russia and the only political party offering a direction other than that of the current authorities. All the other parties support the current authorities.

Romanian readers who follow Russian politics know United Russia as President Vladimir Putin’s party. That is true. But the other parliamentary parties — the CPRF, the LDPR, A Just Russia and New People — are the president’s parties too, because they vote the same way on virtually everything.

What result do you expect in September? What should we expect afterwards on the invasion of Ukraine and the regime’s interference in European countries?

I do not know and I do not want to speculate. The likely result is that 100 percent of the seats will go to parties that support Putin. That will have no effect on Putin’s policy. In the present situation the State Duma does not set Putin’s policy. Putin sets how the State Duma votes, not the other way around.

If there were free elections in Russia tomorrow, could Yabloko enter the Duma? Or has the party become more a moral symbol of the opposition than a real electoral force?

On the polls available now, Yabloko would have come second, after United Russia. That is exactly why it was removed. I have no doubt about that. We could not yet have overtaken United Russia, but I think we would have finished ahead of the Communists.

After Yabloko was taken off the ballots, the share of people saying they would not vote rose by 12 percent. In earlier polls they said they would vote. After the ban they began to say they would not.

In a society that largely runs on absolute consensus and unconditional support for the Kremlin, what signal does a project like Yabloko, campaigning for peace with Ukraine, send?

The most important thing is that you, outside Russia, can no longer say that everyone supports the Kremlin. You can now see how many people in Russia want peace, want decent relations with other countries, and want a different policy. There are millions of them.

Until this summer we knew they existed, but it was not so visible. Now we are talking about millions of people, and about thousands and tens of thousands who state their positions in public on social media, posting videos and texts in support of Yabloko.

They are not doing this because they were always Yabloko voters. No. This summer, during the campaign, they finally saw a party that represents their interests and says what they say: that they want peace, freedom and a life without fear in Russia.

What does Yabloko stand for? Where does the name come from?

In 1993 Russia held its first State Duma elections. The Supreme Soviet had just been dissolved. The party system was not yet formed.

What appeared on the ballot were not parties as such but electoral blocs under the names of people. Each bloc had three names — the people heading the list.

In our case it was the economist Grigory Yavlinsky, the politician Yuri Boldyrev and the diplomat Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. The first letters of their surnames were Ya, B and L — “Yabl.”

Within days journalists were writing about the “Yabl bloc.” In Russian those three letters are the start of a very familiar word: yabloko, apple. The name “Yabloko bloc” almost named itself. The party has kept it ever since.

Yabloko calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine and peace talks. What would an acceptable peace for Ukraine look like to you? Can there be a durable peace if Russia keeps the occupied territories?

For me, first of all, peace means that people stop killing one another.

Everything else has to be settled at the negotiating table. European politicians and Russian ones — as part of European politics — have shown that peace is not guaranteed at all. If after the Second World War and the worst trials of the twentieth century we are back here, we failed to keep the peace.

That responsibility is mine as well, of course, as a Russian politician. I feel it and I accept it: we did not stop the decisions taken by our authorities and by their adversaries, and we did not convince them of the danger of this path.

After that, diplomats and the military must sit down and resolve, however long it takes, the questions of territory, language, economic reconstruction, the rehabilitation of people damaged by the war, and much else, including security guarantees for the future and the future of the European security system.

But that can only be done after the guns fall silent and people stop killing one another. As we warned, and as experience has now shown, while the fighting continues negotiations cannot really move. We see that now.

There are still working contacts between Russia and Ukraine — prisoner exchanges, for example. Those contacts exist. We believe they must finally be turned into negotiations for a ceasefire agreement.

What is your party’s position on Ukraine? Is Ukraine Russia’s?

I do not think anyone believes that.

And Crimea?

Under the Russian Constitution, Crimea is part of Russia. The fact that the question exists means there are problems and questions around the subject. You are not the only one asking. Russian politicians ask it constantly.

That is why all these issues must be settled not by force or aggression but by sitting at the table and discussing every possible aspect, for as long as it takes.

Should Russia pay reparations to Ukraine for the destruction caused by the war?

If politicians start negotiating the terms of peace before there is a ceasefire, they only push a ceasefire further away and, in the end, make it impossible. That is why we say: first the shooting must stop, and only then can we discuss everything else — territories, reconstruction, the terms on which it happens and who pays for it.

We tell European politicians that instead of concentrating on all these questions — security guarantees, reparations and the rest — they should do everything possible to get a ceasefire. This is not the moment to negotiate all the other issues, because every such discussion makes an armistice harder.

There is another risk. If things continue this way, European voters will be more inclined to vote for populists and nationalists who say the money should be spent in Germany, France or Britain, not on supporting Ukraine. That can eventually bring populists, nationalists and the far right to power.

Then peace will become still harder and still more distant. So while it is still possible to stop nationalists and radicals taking power, everything must be done for peace.

There can no longer be a victory for anyone. After everything that has happened, and after the enormous number of dead, eighty years after the Second World War, we have reached a point where, in fact, we have all already lost.

In Romania there are political figures who admire the Kremlin. One example is the leader of an extremist party who sent Putin a message saying Romanian citizens do not hate him. What do you say to admirers of the Kremlin?

I think it is better to admire the people we love, those close to us, the work of artists and writers, the beauty of nature, the world we live in — not politicians. Politics is a profession, after all.

And I want to stress something. The politician you mean probably does not know me, but I put myself in the same category. I am a politician too, a Russian politician. My duty and my responsibility was that what is happening now should not have happened. I am trying to repair things. I have not yet succeeded. In the end I too allowed things to get here. So admire anything else, but not any politician in the world.

What would you say to Romanian citizens who dream of a political leader like Putin?

What is stopping them? They can come to Russia and they would have a president like Putin.

What should a democratic Russia do about the Republic of Moldova? Should Russia give up any claim to a “sphere of influence” in Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia or other former Soviet states?

Our party believes the only path to a more stable peace in Europe as a whole, and in relations among the post-Soviet republics in particular, is the future creation of a new structure — a “Greater Europe.”

We are not talking about integrating Russia and the other post-Soviet states into the European Union. For many reasons that is not realistic. We are talking about creating a new European space that would bring together the current EU member states with Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova and perhaps Kazakhstan. A space from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

First of all it would not be an economic space but one based on shared humanist values: a space in which life and human rights stand above everything, fundamental rights are protected, and people can move freely across that vast territory as they do today in the European Union.

Today, for example, a person could live in Donetsk, then go and live in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and a month or a year later move to Lisbon and then return to Minsk or Chișinău. Wherever they were, they would know their rights were protected and that they were a free person. They could travel to study, for an economic, cultural or artistic project, or simply to be with the person they love.

In a post-Putin Russia, what should happen to Russian troops in Transnistria?

That has to be decided by the people who live there and the people in power.

What is the biggest mistake Europe could make after the war in Ukraine ends?

The biggest mistake would be to try to raise a new “iron wall” around Russia.

Europe has no future without Russia, which is a huge and natural part of Europe — culturally, economically and scientifically. We cannot build a prosperous European space apart from Russia while competing with the United States and China. Russia cannot succeed apart from the EU states and the other European countries. And the European Union cannot succeed without Russia.

That is why building such an extended space, from Lisbon to Vladivostok, including the countries of Europe, is essential for all our futures. Not only politically and in humanist terms, but in practical, economic terms.

You had, and still have, important differences with Alexei Navalny’s movement, including over “smart voting” — Navalny’s strategy of concentrating opposition votes on the candidate best placed to beat United Russia. Looking back, was Yabloko wrong to refuse that strategy?

I believe those who argued for that strategy bear a large share of the responsibility for what happened on 24 February 2022.

They backed — and, what is truly astonishing, they still back today — political parties that support everything that is happening between Russia and Ukraine. It is astonishing. I cannot understand what is going on with these people who, at least in their declarations, want peace and freedom, but urge people to vote for war and for the absence of freedom.

I do not know what must be in these people’s minds.

If in ten years you look back at 2026, what will you be able to say about this election: that it was the end of the Russian democratic opposition, or the beginning of the end of Putin’s regime?

Ten years is a long time. If in ten years I can say anything at all, that already means things are all right.

The most important word we now hear from the young people who are coming to us in very large numbers is, of course, “peace,” because everyone wants peace. They say: “We do not want to leave Russia. We want to make Russia the country you want too: free, safe, a place where people live without fear. And now we have hope that we can do that.”

So “hope” is the only word I want to use when I think about what will be in ten years.

The original interview in Romanian by EUalive’s partner PressOne can be found here.

Caption: Nikolai Rybakov, leader of Yabloko [PressOne]