Russian Supreme Court orders dissolution of opposition party

The Supreme Court of Russia today liquidated the opposition party PARNAS (People’s Freedom Party), led among others by the liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, shot dead in 2015 outside the walls of the Kremlin. The argument put forward by the Ministry of Justice was that the number of subsidiaries of the political formation had been reduced since the beginning of the year from 47 to 40, according to the Mediazona portal.

In this way, the party has affiliates in less than half of the regions of this country, sufficient reason for its immediate liquidation. PARNAS argues that it currently has 44 subsidiaries, more than half of the federated entities that existed before the start of the war in Ukraine (85).

Russia annexed in September 2022 four Ukrainian regions -Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia-, which were included in the Constitution, so now in the Russian Federation there are 89 regions. The opposition party considers that these regions cannot be taken into account, since they still do not have executive bodies as such.

Founded in 1990 as the Russian Republican Party, it changed its name in 2012 when decided to join other opposition formations critical of the Russian president, Vladimir Poutine. Besides Nemtsov, the party included former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov and imprisoned Ilya Yashin, who is serving an eight-and-a-half-year prison term for criticizing Russian military actions in Ukraine.

The extra-parliamentary opposition accuses the Kremlin of pressuring its leaders to silence their critics of the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, sentencing them to long prison terms or forcing them into exile. Even if the president has denied plans to launch a ‘witch hunt’ordered the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the security forces to take measures to put an end to the “scum” in this country.