You most likely heard nothing about Russia’s so-called Green Party, which took part in Russia’s 2026 parliamentary elections. Not that its candidates have had success in anything other than getting its competitors from the liberal Yabloko party blocked in courts across the country.

Despite its state-registered name, it is completely wrong to call the members of this party greens, so let us come up with something more realistic for this description. For example, the pseudo-environmental pseudo-party — PEPP.

This is far from the first time that the presidential administration has authorized pseudo-environmentalists in elections, but this has never resulted in any success at the federal level. The situation seems paradoxical: Russians are generally sympathetic to environmental causes but are not prepared to vote for the dubious sorts of people who usually run for office on an environmentalist platform.

Previously, projects like these at least had Russian names. Now this one is simply a calque of the name of the German Green Party, the most successful party of its kind in the world and a fierce opponent of Putin and the war in Ukraine. A copy is always much worse than the original, not that you can describe this PEPP as much of a copy.

We look at the face of the party online and immediately find a statement against hatred and cruelty — all very commendable. Apparently following this principle, one of the party’s co-chairs, Andrei Nagibin, enthusiastically supported the war in Ukraine from 2022 onwards, saying he was deeply concerned about the supposed biolaboratories scattered all across Ukraine.

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