Despite being known as a dictatorship, Russia is officially a democracy.

The trick is to have 11 parties in the ballot: the first is Putin, which always "wins" 50% of the vote. The next nine are also Putin, but under different names: Communist Putin, Liberal Putin, Nationalist Putin. The name is the only difference between them—the politics are completely the same.

There is only one opposition party: Yabloko (Apple). Every five years they run for the State Duma (parlament), but always get around 1% of the vote—not enough to be in the Duma, which requires 5%.

But next month, the first Duma election since the start of the war will take place. Yabloko ran with the shortest campaign slogan in their history; only 43 words long, it boiled down to "STOP THE WAR". A vote for Yabloko, no matter whether you agree with the rest of their politics, was the only way to vote against the war. The party was getting more and more popular, with the polls showing their support at a whopping 18%. Even more surprisingly, the party was not immediately designated an illegal organization and was actually allowed to run in the election. It was clear to everyone: the vote will still be rigged, and Putin will still win, but Yabloko has the full chance of getting 5% of the vote and winning a few seats at the Duma. A glimmer of hope for the country was spreading among the anti-war citizens.

Until today.

A hearing was just held by the Supreme Court on a lawsuit filed by one of the smaller Putin parties, demanding for Yabloko to be banned from the election. They won. Yabloko is no longer running.

The most infuriating thing is the cited reason for their removal. There lawsuit had some usual arguments: the party is extremist, the party receives illegal foreign funding; those arguments were quickly disproven and dismissed. Instead, the court focused on an interview with Yabloko's founder, in which the interviewer quoted a children's song and a popular line from a book without the permission of their authors. Yep, you read that right. It was a copyright lawsuit: since the interview was promotional material and violated copyright, that means the party engaged in illegal promotion and shouldn't be allowed to run. All because of two small quotes (which are so common they're basically proverbs) and some picture from the internet they put in the interview.

I'm so fucking done with this country.

A Finnish language news article at the Finnish public broadcasting company's website notes that 4% of Finns currently feel that the US inspires confidence in them. 1% of respondents say the same about Russia and 3% about China. Looking at it from the opposite angle, 88% said that Russia decreases their confidence, 73% said the same about the US, and 59% about China.

The poll had a little over 1000 respondents and was carried out before the war in Iran started. The question for the above data was (my translation) "Do the following entities inspire confidence in you at the moment?" which, I suppose, is a way to measure social trust. The pollster's own report, also in Finnish, can be found here. They calculate their statistical margin of error at approximately ±3.1 percentage points at a 95% confidence level. In addition to "increases confidence", the possible answers were "doesn't increase or decrease confidence", "I don't know", and "decreases confidence".

According to the poll, more Finns gain confidence from Nordic countries (59%) than they do from Finland itself (46%). Nato (44%) ranked highest as an international organisation, with the EU second (30%).

Of domestic and social entities, the defence forces ranked highest (67%), with the president second (52%) and the police third (51%). Less than 10% of respondents felt that these three decreased their confidence (or, I suppose, social trust). Social media (2%), influencers (2%), and political parties (3%) ranked lowest as sources of social trust.

Other results that I found interesting are that 84% of the respondents either fully or partially agreed that Nordic countries are the best countries to live in and 78% fully or partially agreed that they can trust fellow humans in their everyday lives. 75% of the respondents either fully or partially agree that Finnish universities produce trustworthy information. 36% agreed either fully or partially that Finnish companies take social responsibility seriously and don't just look out for their owners' interests, while 15% felt the same about international corporations.

Overall, the report suggests that the state of social trust in Finland is on the decline.