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A bespectacled 60-year-old who freely admits he lacks charisma or heroism has emerged as Russia’s unlikely anti-war candidate willing to oppose Vladimir Putin in the upcoming election.
Boris Nadezhdin, whose surname stems from the Russian word for hope, is a local legislator and former bureaucrat turned academic. Now, he is running to become the next president of Russia as the country goes to the polls next March.
He has been endorsed by the wife of jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Yekatarina Duntsova, a former regional lawmaker who looked to be the main anti-war candidate before the Kremlin struck off her application due to alleged technical errors in her paperwork.
“My aim is to change Russia,” he told the BBC in a recent interview. “I may not be president on 17 March but I should have the best result.”
“My first task will be to stop the conflict with Ukraine, and then to restore normal relations between Russia and the western community.”
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Mr Nadezhdin poses with supporters during an unannounced event in Moscow
(Telegram / Boris Nadezhdin )
The unlikely candidate has struck a chord with the public, openly calling for a halt to the conflict in Ukraine, the end of mobilizing Russian men for the military, and starting a dialogue with the West. He also has criticised the country’s repression of LGBTQ+ activism.
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Mr Nadezhdin is running as a candidate for the Civic Initiative Party, a party that is not represented in parliament.
As a result, his team must collect over 100,000 signatures by 31 January for him to be allowed to stand. He cannot have more than 2,500 from each of the dozens of the vast country’s regions, precluding him from accruing votes just from the larger, more progressive cities.
Mr Nadezhdin’s team say he has already surpassed the 100,000 but that remains to be confirmed. If it is, there is still no guarantee he will be allowed to run.
Mr Putin, who is running as an independent candidate rather than as the candidate of the United Russia ruling party, has collected over 3 million signatures thus far.
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a keel laying ceremony for the 5th nuclear-powered icebreaker Leningrad (Project 22220) at the Baltiysky Shipyard in St. Petersburg
(AP)
Online videos have shown queues of Nadezhdin supporters not just in Moscow and St. Petersburg but also in Krasnodar in the south, Saratov and Voronezh in the southwest and beyond the Ural Mountains in Yekaterinburg.
Even in the Far East city of Yakutsk, 280 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Nadezhdin’s team said up to 400 people a day braved temperatures that plunged to minus 40 Celsius to sign petitions.
Some analysts say the surge of support for Nadezhdin has surprised even the Kremlin, although Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that “we don’t see him as a rival”.
Others say he is a Kremlin project designed to give false legitimacy to the upcoming presidential election. If he was a genuine threat, they say, the Kremlin would have arrested him.
They point to his work in the 1990s as an aide to Sergei Kiriyenko, a prime minister under Boris Yeltsin who is now Putin’s chief of staff, as suspicious - though Mr Nadezhdin was also an associate of Boris Nemstov, a longtime critic of Mr Putin who was murdered outside the Kremlin in 2015.
In a recent interview with CNN, Mr Nadezhdin said he “doesn’t know why I’m not arrested”.
Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, signs her support for Boris Nadezhdin in Vilnius, Lithuania
(X / Ruslan Shaveddinov)
The Kremlin wasted no time using the courts to silence Mr Putin’s opposition following the announcement in December last year of the next presidential election, set for 17 March.
Three days after Putin announced his intention to run, his jailed rival Mr Navalny was declared missing.
He would not be found for another three weeks, having been moved to a penal colony in the Arctic Circle, roughly 1,200 miles northeast of Moscow. He has been in jail since 2021.
Igor Girkin, a pro-war ultranationalist who had declared his intention to challenge Putin for the presidency, had his pretrial detention extended the day the election was announced.
He has since been sentenced to four years in a penal colony on charges of extremism after he urged Putin to pass power “to someone truly capable and responsible” of running the war in Ukraine.
More about Russia Vladimir Putin Mikhail Khodorkovsky Kremlin Ukraine
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1/ 4Who is Boris Nadezhdin? The Russian candidate standing against Putin
Who is Boris Nadezhdin? The Russian candidate standing against Putin
Mr Nadezhdin poses with supporters during an unannounced event in Moscow
Telegram / Boris Nadezhdin
Who is Boris Nadezhdin? The Russian candidate standing against Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a keel laying ceremony for the 5th nuclear-powered icebreaker Leningrad (Project 22220) at the Baltiysky Shipyard in St. Petersburg
AP
Who is Boris Nadezhdin? The Russian candidate standing against Putin
Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, signs her support for Boris Nadezhdin in Vilnius, Lithuania
X / Ruslan Shaveddinov
Who is Boris Nadezhdin? The Russian candidate standing against Putin
Boris Nadezhdin, a Russian liberal politician, running for Russia's March 17 presidential election
AP
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