Political analyst Vadym Denysenko, head of the Dilova Stolytsia analytical center, expressed this view during the expert discussion "Russian Elections and Temporarily Occupied Territories: Challenges for Ukraine," according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"The authorities have not yet decided what to do with Yabloko. They would very much like to keep it in the nationwide election campaign and take away at least 4-5% of its vote, so as to show that it has only 2-3% support and that an anti-war party has no chance of winning," the expert said.

According to Denysenko, in all regions where Yabloko has a strong presence, the party has been barred from participating in regional elections.

"In the national elections, they will try to keep it in the race to show that there is no anti-war agenda, although that is an absolute lie," the political analyst said.

At the same time, he said, no decision has yet been made on Yabloko: whether to remove the party from the election altogether if it has a chance of winning 10% of the vote, or to "redirect" its votes to the United Russia party through election fraud.

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Elections to Russia's State Duma will be held in September. At the same time, regional elections will take place in a number of Russian regions.

These will be the first State Duma elections since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For the first time, the aggressor state is organizing elections in the temporarily occupied parts of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Luhansk regions.

Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service believes that the low level of support for the war ahead of the September State Duma elections poses additional risks for the Russian authorities.