* Yekaterina Duntsova who had announced she would challenge President Putin in the spring elections come next year has been barred from standing.
* The former T.V journalist was set to run on an independent bid against President Putin.
* The electoral commission voted unanimously to end reject her candidancy due to her alignment with ending the war with Ukraine.
Independent politician and former T.V journalist Yekaterina Duntsova has been barred from the presidential elections come next year in a vote unanimously carried out by the electoral commission that rejected her candidancy three days after her application allegedly finding 100 mistakes on her form. However Ms. Duntsova retaliated saying she would appeal the decision at the Supreme court inorder to participate in the presidential elections which will take place next year and will be the first of its kind since President Putin launched his full scale invasion of Ukraine nearly two years ago on 24th February.
The action of the electoral commission has been viewed by many critics as the regime's zero tolerance to any position campaign. The head of the Russian electoral commission Ella Pamfilova said Ms. Duntsova would not be allowed to progress to the next stage of gathering thousand of supporters. " You are a young woman, you have everything ahead of you. Any minus can always be turned to a plus, any experience is still an experience" she told Ms Duntsova, 40 after the decesion.The former journalist had declared her ambition to stand in November and was quoted to say " Any same person taking this step would be afraid but fear must not win."
It should also be noted that the constitution governing Russia was ammended in 2020 increasing the presidential term from four years to six years and also cancelled Putin's former terms giving him a clean slate to re-run for presidency. Moscow has sidelined the opposition for years with a massive crackdown on figures like Alexei Navalny whose where abouts were only discovered recently and President Putin is said to enjoy genuine support among the Russians. In her manifesto, Duntsova had been much more inclined to ending the war in Ukraine and freeing political prisoners.
