Ballot paper, runway and border strip: four claims around Russia
Yabloko loses its federal list, US officials link a Leipzig drone bomb to Russia while Berlin holds back, Moscow warns over Transnistria, and Zelenskyy claims a new North Korean missile batch.
Geopolitics··Morning
Yabloko's list drops from the September ballot
Russia's Supreme Court on Monday struck the federal list of the liberal Yabloko party from the September parliamentary vote. Al Jazeera reports that the court granted a suit brought by the nationalist Rodina party, which alleged that Yabloko had received undeclared campaign support, including from Western sources. Judge Vyacheslav Kirillov said the claims seeking to annul the registration were granted. Yabloko is described as the only registered party in Russia that opposes the war in Ukraine. Its chairman, Nikolai Rybakov, said the party would stay committed to stopping the deaths and bringing peace, adding that a long road lay ahead. Recent polling puts its support at about 3 percent against the 5 percent threshold needed to enter the lower house, and the party last won seats in 2003. The exclusion is a domestic legal step that removes a registered list from the ballot before the campaign can test that support at the polls.[1]
Attribution at Leipzig, no accusation from Berlin
Separately, The Guardian reports a contested attribution around a bomb-laden drone found at Leipzig airport. Citing The Wall Street Journal, it says US officials familiar with intelligence on the incident wrote that the drone probably belonged to the Russian government, while CNN reported that Washington had concluded the device came from a Russian secret service. German officials have so far levelled no specific accusation against Moscow. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt described the incident as a professional hybrid threat scenario run by a well-equipped foreign actor and spoke of a new level of danger for Germany. The quadcopter, fitted with semtex, was found next to a Ukrainian cargo plane, flew past the airport's defences and was immobilised only after an alert bus driver reported it, an estimated four hours after it breached security. Bild reported that DNA traces at the scene matched a sample from a mailed firebomb that exploded at the same airport in July 2024; five men linked to that series are on trial in Lithuania, where prosecutors allege they were employed by Russian intelligence. Those prosecution claims and the US assessments remain attributions that Berlin has not matched with a formal accusation.[2]
A Transnistria warning and an unverified missile claim
On the regional and procurement front, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin said Moscow would regard any armed provocations by Ukraine and Moldova against Transnistria as an attack on Russia. He said Moscow would use all available means to protect Russians in the region and was ready for any development of events. The remarks followed the crash and explosion of a drone on 9 August in the village of Crocmaz in Moldova's Stefan Voda district near the Ukrainian border; Chisinau called the incident a violation of its sovereignty and recalled its ambassador to Moscow for consultations. Galuzin also listed quotas on embassy staff, expulsions of diplomats and restrictive border measures as hostile steps. Russia maintains its Operational Group of Russian Forces and peacekeepers in Transnistria. In a separate claim, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram on Monday that Russia had received a new batch of ballistic missiles from North Korea and alleged that Moscow was preparing to deploy an additional contingent of North Korean forces on its own territory. Anadolu Agency noted that Russia did not immediately comment and that independent verification is difficult in wartime conditions. Zelenskyy made the assessment while describing Ukraine's long-range strikes, saying Ukrainian forces had hit an oil-refining facility in Tobolsk, Siberia, more than 2,500 kilometres from Ukraine. Domestic ballot exclusion, contested covert attribution, a regional warning, and an unverified procurement claim each sit in a different pressure ring around Russia and its neighbours.[3], [4]
