Boris Nadezhdin convicted in Russia, barred from 2024 parliamentary race

Moscow,UPDATED: Jul 17, 2026 18:50 IST

Russian opposition figure Boris Nadezhdin, who criticised Moscow's military action in Ukraine and tried to challenge President Vladimir Putin in the 2024 election, was convicted on Friday of displaying "extremist symbols", a ruling that will keep him out of this year's parliamentary race.

On the same day, another Putin critic, Ilya Remeslo, was arrested in St Petersburg on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military. The accusation has been widely used against people who oppose the government's policies.

The case against 63-year-old Nadezhdin was linked to a 2023 online interview in which he briefly showed a picture of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny. At the time, Navalny was serving a 19-year prison sentence on extremism charges that were widely seen as politically motivated. Navalny later died in an Arctic penal colony on February 16, 2024.

Nadezhdin rejected the case as absurd and said the authorities were trying to stop him from campaigning in September's parliamentary vote. A court in Dolgoprudny, where he lives on Moscow's northern outskirts, convicted him and fined him 1,000 roubles, or about USD 13.

A week earlier, Russia's Justice Ministry had labelled Nadezhdin a "foreign agent", a designation with strong pejorative connotations that brings added government scrutiny. It also bars him from holding public office, though he had still been able to run a symbolic campaign for a parliament seat until Friday's verdict.

Nadezhdin said he felt unwell during Friday's hearing, which was paused so an ambulance team could examine him. Before the hearing, he said he was considering going abroad but had been barred from leaving Russia.

In January 2024, Nadezhdin collected thousands of signatures as he openly called for an end to the fighting in Ukraine. But he was kept off the March 2024 presidential ballot after Russia's Supreme Court ruled that more than 9,000 signatures submitted by his campaign were invalid, enough to disqualify him. Putin faced only token opposition in the election and easily won a fifth term.

After the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, the authorities intensified their crackdown on dissent and free speech, targeting rights groups, independent media, civil society members, LGBTQ+ activists and some religious groups. Hundreds of people have been jailed and thousands have left the country.

In the other case on Friday, Remeslo, a pro-Kremlin activist and blogger who later became a Putin critic, was detained in St Petersburg. State news agency TASS reported that he would be taken to Moscow for a court hearing.

In March, Remeslo criticised the military action in Ukraine and called for Putin's resignation. Soon afterwards, he was placed in a psychiatric clinic, where he spent a month in what he said was punishment for his remarks.

Nadezhdin's conviction and Remeslo's arrest marked two fresh developments on Friday involving critics of the Russian government, against the backdrop of the wider crackdown that has followed the war in Ukraine.

With PTI Inputs

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