Letter From the Editors

The Russian authorities shifted their sights to the RFCP this week as a Supreme Court appeals panel upheld that court’s ruling summarily ejecting Yabloko from the rapidly approaching State Duma elections. At issue for both parties are alleged violations of copyright and extremism laws in the campaign materials of targeted candidates. In the most prominent RFCP case, Samara Province State Duma Deputy Mikhail Matveyev, whom voters see as particularly effective at addressing their concerns, was disqualified for violating copyright by using Microsoft fonts without a license, even though Microsoft has not sold any licenses in Russia since the latter invaded Ukraine in 2022.

In an analysis of Matveyev’s case for Sovetskaya Rossia, Yevgeny Fedorinov writes that candidates are being barred from the races “not for lack of results, not for empty promises, but for photos, fonts and logos,” which he says are the kinds of details voters do not feel have any “relation whatsoever to a politician’s actual work.” According to him, the election campaign in Samara is beginning to resemble “a perfectly streamlined process to eliminate inconvenient candidates.”

Although Matveyev’s fate is as good as sealed, he has appealed the ruling against him, likening the authorities’ meddling in the campaign to the opening of Pandora’s box. In a twist, Matveyev has filed a “mirror” lawsuit against his United Russia opponent, Aleksandr Zhivaikin. As Matveyev explained, this lawsuit copies the original lawsuit’s “conceptual framework word for word. The arguments are the same, but the evidence was taken from [Zhivaikin’s] social media.*** We found that he committed all the violations I have been charged with.” So, he concludes, “let’s see how Samara’s Themis will extricate herself from this.”

But why all this maneuvering on the part of United Russia? After all, it has the upcoming elections in the bag even without instigating any frivolous lawsuits. In an article for The Moscow Times, Aleksandr Shulga presents a possible reason for this, suggesting that Putin’s trust rating is actually not as high as it is made out to be. According to him, Russian pollsters use “closed questions” to determine this indicator, which forces respondents to choose “the most acceptable answer.” This, he says, is why Putin’s trust rating is hovering around 70% even after over four years of war, mass amounts of Russian fatalities, tremendous economic losses, fuel shortages and increasing restrictions on human and civil rights. However, when ARCSPO used open-ended questions in an April 2026 poll, Putin’s trust rating plummeted to 29.5%, a figure precipitously low compared to the 80% that Shulga says is the minimum requirement for authoritarian regimes.

Meanwhile, Iran’s authoritarian regime continues to hold on to power as the 60-day ceasefire that country signed with the US ends this week. As Alisa Voloshina writes in Izvestia, negotiations have been mostly stagnant, and the level of mutual threats remains high. But considering its depleted missile stocks, the US will now have to limit itself to economic measures, with President Trump taking to Truth Social to declare “an ECONOMIC D-DAY” and calling the sanctions pressure “the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country.” Iran, however, remained uncowed: Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi quickly responded on X, saying that “US economic terrorism threatens the global economy and sovereignty worldwide.” However, experts agree that with Iran’s stable supply of foreign currency and food, the US will have to deal with the inconvenient truth that Tehran is not currently facing popular discontent and “truly can afford to prolong the conflict.”

Ultimately, though, Trump will not be able unleash his full-scale “economic operation” until after the midterm elections in November: US voters are too concerned about the price of gas for the administration to risk any moves that might cause a spike in expenses for average Americans and, accordingly, cost the Republicans votes. But those elections are a can of worms that we don’t have to open quite yet.