Russia's Supreme Court on February 15 rejected two appeals filed by anti-war presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin related to a decision by election officials not to register him for next month's election.
The Central Election Commission (TsIK), which routinely refuses to register would-be opposition candidates on the pretext that they submitted an insufficient number of valid signatures, disqualified thousands of signatures Nadezhdin's representatives gathered across the country to reach the 100,000-signature threshold needed to be registered as a candidate.
The first appeal was related to the TsIK's justifying its decision by the fact that many of Nadezhdin's representatives who collected the signatures had power-of-attorney papers certified by notary offices in regions other than the ones they were collecting the signatures in.
Nadezhdin insists that the TsIK abused its powers because no Russian law says signature collectors' powers of attorney must be certified in the same regions where the signatures are collected.
In his second appeal, Nadezhdin questioned the TsIK's documents on checking his supporters' signatures, saying that the TsIK failed to add the written conclusions of handwriting experts to its signature-inspection protocols.
The Uzbekistan-born 60-year-old academic and former lawmaker, who was proposed as a presidential candidate by the Civic Platform party, vowed to appeal both Supreme Court rulings and file a third appeal with the Supreme Court challenging the TsIK's final decision to bar him from the election.
"I am not giving up and I will not give up," Nadezhdin wrote on Telegram.
Nadezhdin is the only politician with presidential ambitions who has publicly condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine and criticized incumbent Vladimir Putin. The poll will be held on March 15-17.
Russian elections are tightly controlled by the Kremlin and are neither free nor fair but are viewed by the government as necessary to convey a sense of legitimacy.
They are mangled by the exclusion of opposition candidates, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and other means of manipulation.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin's tight grip on politics, media, law enforcement, and other levers nationwide means Putin, who has ruled Russia as president or prime minister since 1999, is certain to win, barring a very big, unexpected development.
But the surprising show of support for the little-known Nadezhdin, whose platform says the invasion of Ukraine was a "fatal mistake" and accuses Putin of dragging Russia into the past instead of building a sustainable future, is complicating the Kremlin's more aggressive ambition of boosting the perception of Putin's legitimacy.
Opposition voices expected to be Putin's main challengers are currently either incarcerated or fled the country, fearing for their safety.