Russian police arrest Kremlin critic Boris Nadezhdin before September vote

Russian police arrested Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war Kremlin critic who planned to run in lower-house elections in September.

Nadezhdin, 63, became widely known in Russia in 2024 when he gathered support to run against President Vladimir Putin in that year’s presidential election. He was barred from standing after a short campaign. AFP described him as one of the few Putin critics in Russia who publicly criticises Putin’s rule and Moscow’s war in Ukraine and is not in prison or exile.

“The police came,” Nadezhdin wrote on Telegram. He later published a document saying he was being charged with “demonstration of extremist symbols” over a 2023 video that included a photo of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Navalny died in an Arctic prison in February 2024, shortly before a presidential election.

A lawyer told Russian independent media that Nadezhdin would be taken to court later on Monday. The arrest came three days after authorities declared him a “foreign agent”, a label AFP said is used by the Kremlin to stifle dissent.

Nadezhdin had been gathering signatures to register as a candidate for lower-house elections in September. Putin has set the parliamentary election for September 20.

Nadezhdin said last week that the “foreign agent” label would not stop him from gathering signatures and that he planned to challenge what he called the “idiotic” label in court. In a YouTube video, he said he was the only independent opposition candidate in Russia gathering signatures to run, and that he planned to stand in the northern Moscow suburbs.

In the video, Nadezhdin directly criticised Putin. He said the consequences of the war were clear to everyone, citing what he called a petrol crisis caused by Ukrainian drone strikes and rising prices. He said Putin’s course over 25 years in power was one of militarisation, isolationism and authoritarianism, and warned that it could lead to chaos.