This man wants to run against Putin. Thousands of Russians are helping him.

[Uncle Joe]

Russians in Moscow line up Jan. 23, 2024, outside the campaign office of Boris Nadezhdin, an antiwar candidate who needs 100,000 signatures to qualify as a candidate to challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)

RIGA, Latvia — Boris Nadezhdin claims he wants to do the unthinkable: unseat Vladimir Putin in Russia’s March presidential election by campaigning against the war in Ukraine. Many Putin critics suspect that Nadezhdin, a former member of parliament, is playing by the Kremlin’s rules — and is the latest to join a cast of approved opposition candidates used to create a sheen of democracy in a ruthless, authoritarian state where true dissent is crushed and genuine challengers are jailed or exiled.

Despite these misgivings, tens of thousands of antiwar Russians have flocked to help Nadezhdin get on the ballot. They don’t believe he will win, and some even dislike him, citing his appearances on propagandist state television programs and his previous job as an aide to Sergei Kiriyenko, who is now Putin’s domestic policy czar. Nonetheless, they view Nadezhdin, 60, as their own tool — a way to signal to the world that many Russians are outraged by the war and want Putin dislodged from office.

Shrugging off the question of whether he is an independent candidate or a spoiler, Russians at home and abroad waited in lines for hours, helping him amass 180,000 signatures as of Friday, well over the required minimum of 100,000 Nadezhdin needs to qualify as a candidate.

(snip)

“He is in no way a dream candidate,” Ivan Zhdanov, the head of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said. “But our position from the get-go was that any candidate who is not Vladimir Putin is a good thing.”

(snip)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/26/putin-challenger-russia-boris-nadezhdin/

[Silent Type]

1. Where do we contribute?

[Sopiadiaz201]

2. Hello

Hello , How Are you

[Uncle Joe]

3. Hello,

welcome to D.U.

[Warpy]

4. Hope it's not another bait and switch

but Yekatarina Duntsova seems to be helping him gather signatures and the like.

I just heard about this campaign earlier today. The person I heard if from doesn't think he should be trusted, that he might be used to smoke out dissidents. I hope he's wrong, but it's just the thing Putin's intelligence services would do.

[Chainfire]

5. I hope the man has had flying lessons.

[KS Toronado]

6. Be wise to carry a parachute wouldn't it ?