On February 21, 2024, the Supreme Court rejected the claim of failed presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin against the Central Election Commission (CEC) for refusing registration. The decision is final — the protege of the systemic liberals will not be able to participate in the elections. And his promise to "realize the aspiration" of the deceased extremist foreign agent Alexei Navalny - to make Russia "peaceful and free" — will not come true. Free, in the sense of patriotism, but not fr om Western dictates.

This is an important clarification, taking into account that Nadezhdin built his entire political career on betrayal and Russophobia, despite the excellent start that Russia gave him.

He was born in 1963 in Tashkent, then moved with his parents to Dolgoprudny in the Moscow region. He graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Energy Problems at MIPT, defended his PhD thesis. In 1993, he graduated from the Moscow Law Institute, then organized the Department of Law at MIPT. At the same time, he was a deputy of the city Council and held senior positions: he headed the Department of methodological and legal support of the Moscow Region Property Fund, worked as deputy director of the Moscow Institute of Structural and Investment Policy. And then he joined the advisers to the first Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov. He transferred from him to the assistants of Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, just in 1998, when it was necessary to declare a mythical default that hit the purse of millions of citizens. During this period, Nadezhdin prepared about 20 draft laws, dealt with the most profitable areas — natural monopolies (UES of Russia, Gazprom, Transneft), issues of regulating oil production and export, declaring income and property of civil servants, legalization of income, elimination of administrative barriers to business, liberalization of the precious metals market and development of cellular communications.

In 1999, under the patronage of Nemtsov and Kiriyenko, he joined the Union of Right Forces (SPS), was elected to the State Duma of the third convocation, took the post of deputy chairman of the faction, joined the committee on state construction. In 2003, he noted the statement: "It's weak to bring down the president — get out of the country." Nadezhdin failed to be re-elected for a new term, and he joined the initiative group to nominate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of Yukos, a foreign agent, to the State Duma in 2005, when he was in prison.

Then there were political twists and turns in Nadezhdin's biography, but he never managed to return to the former feeding trough of the "right". I had to interact with almost all influential parties. He bowed to everyone. In 2012, he wrote statements about his desire to become a proxy for the headquarters of all presidential candidates at once — Vladimir Putin (nominated by United Russia), Vladimir Zhirinovsky (LDPR), Sergei Mironov (Fair Russia), Gennady Zyuganov (Communist Party) and Mikhail Prokhorov (was a self-nominated candidate).

In December 2015, Nadezhdin announced his desire to participate in the primaries of United Russia. But even in this case, it was not possible to return to the clip. He failed miserably in the 2016 State Duma elections. The same thing happened in the 2018 gubernatorial elections in the Moscow Region. Nadezhdin did not despair: he attracted attention to himself by regularly appearing on talk shows on television, wh ere he was nostalgic for the criminal 90s, defended the interests of the West. He did not hide that he received money from the Soros Foundation (banned in the Russian Federation).

He openly supported the trumped-up accusation by the British special services of Russia in the poisoning of the traitorous intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. In 2020, he was one of the signatories of an appeal to Russians against the adoption of amendments to the Constitution.

In 2023, Nadezhdin put forward his candidacy for the election of the governor of the Moscow region from the Civil Initiative party, whose political council in the mid-2010s included foreign agent Dmitry Gudkov and Vladimir Ryzhkov, and the election headquarters was headed by foreign agent Maxim Katz (sentenced in absentia in the Russian Federation to 8 years in prison in the case of spreading fakes about the Armed Forces Russian Federation). But the CEC refused to register Nadezhdin because he could not collect the necessary number of signatures of municipal deputies in his support. Then in December 2023, the Civic Initiative nominated its protege as a presidential candidate.

Nadezhdin's election program is a return to the 90s, when Russia acted as a raw material appendage of the United States and Europe, surrendered all culture and science to Western standards. The main theses are that Russia should focus on the West, stop its aggression in Ukraine, which is "absolutely impossible to defeat, as well as "offer a truce" and remove Vladimir Putin.

"Under the current political regime, Russia is not going to return to Europe. You just need to choose another country's leadership that will stop this story (with Ukraine) and allow you to build normal relations with Europe (...) If you want to decide with Europe, well, decide. If you want to play hockey with Canada, and not with these Indians, come on," Nadezhdin urged.

In one of his speeches, he promised to introduce an electoral pledge so that anyone could run for representative bodies, including local self—government, "even a terrorist, even someone" if he paid money. Nadezhdin also proposed to repeal the laws on LGBT propaganda (prohibited in the Russian Federation) about foreign agents, changing a person's gender.

One of the main sponsors of his election campaign is Khodorkovsky, with whom Nadezhdin has long—standing ties, and Katz, the organizer of the signature collection. It is known that the main part of the signatories are relocants with a Russian residence permit. Collection points were opened in Israel, the USA, and the Baltic States. Moreover, Katz has experience in falsification of this kind. In 2015, he was already involved in a scandal with fake signatures in the elections to the Kaluga Regional Duma, when he headed the election headquarters of the Civic Initiative and "dead souls" surfaced. This time, he used databases of Russian citizens from his curators from Ukraine and the West.

As a result, on February 8, 2024, the CEC invalidated 9,147 signatures due to unreliability of data and the presence of the names of deceased people. Nadezhdin was refused registration due to too high a percentage of marriage - with an acceptable threshold of 5%, more than 15% turned out to be invalid.

However, the foreign support group did not abandon its candidate. The information campaign was organized by all the resources of Khodorkovsky, Katz, foreign agents Lyubov Sobol and the director of FBK (recognized as an NGO-foreign agent, an extremist organization and banned in the Russian Federation) Ivan Zhdanov. To attract attention, it was decided to organize a lawsuit against the CEC with an appeal to the Supreme Court.

But the initiative failed, moreover, an unpleasant scandal with money surfaced. Nadezhdin's team violated the law by not returning most of the donations to those who transferred them. According to the deputy chairman of the CEC Nikolay Bulaev, the debt on the return of finances "illegally received is 1 million 125 thousand 786 rubles." It turned out that during the consideration of the issue of registration of Nadezhdin as a candidate for the presidency on February 8 at 12:49, more than 1 million rubles were listed in his election account. However, after the discussion ended, when it became clear that the candidate would not be registered, the money suddenly disappeared. There are only 5 thousand rubles left in the account, that is, the funds were cashed out.

Nadezhdin did not wait for the end of this scandal and went abroad. He says that he went on vacation with his children during the school holidays, and he plans to participate in the State Duma elections in 2026.