Yesterday, the crackdown that marked the Russian parliamentary elections continued, in the first three days of voting in which opponents sympathetic to Alexei Navalny’s movement tried to participate at all costs.

They cannot do it directly: since the opposition leader’s political network, held in prison since January, was blocked in June, running or publicizing in the name of Navalny became impossible. Later, however, the constituency was also sealed around “smart voting,” the mechanism recommended by each constituency by name – among those vying for accepted opposition parties – with the greatest chance of defeating the party’s candidate for power, United Russia. So as not to disperse the protest votes.

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However, she opposed the money transfer battle, which Ivan Zhdanov – one of Navalny’s closest collaborators – yesterday called a “disgraceful act of political censorship”: when the poll was opened, the system application downloaded to mobile phones by Google and Apple was removed, and it was not possible to Access it along with its recommendations within the Russian Federation.

A practical example of the increasingly stagnant environment in which the Russian Internet moves: on the eve of the vote, the website and Telegram channel of the “smart voting” system was attacked; While representatives of Apple and Google had been warned by the authorities that failure to remove the application from online stores would have led to penalties and criminal proceedings against Russian employees of the two high-tech giants, who could have been accused of interfering in the Russian election process . John Sullivan, the US ambassador to Moscow, who has been recalled to the State Department, was also dismissed from the warning.

“It is a shame that these companies are playing the latter’s game in the confrontation between the honest and the corrupt system,” said Kira Garmisch, a spokeswoman for Navaleng.