Only four candidates will be on the ballot for Russia’s presidential elections in March after the Central Election Commission (CEC) rejected the applications of the only anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin.

Chairperson Ella Pamfilova told a meeting of the commission that the CEC declined to register presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin of the Civic Initiative party as well as Sergey Malinkovich of the Communists of Russia party and self-nominees Rada Russkikh and Anatoly Batashev.

Nadezhdin injected an unexpected element of excitement into an otherwise predictable election that was seen as a foregone conclusion, ending in an almost inevitable victory for incumbent Vladimir Putin.

Nadezhdin application ran into trouble when the CEC rejected 15% of the 105,000 signatures he submitted that is part of the application process. Candidates need to have at least 100,000 approved signatures to be eligible to run and the CEC’s decision to disqualify over 9,000 names in effect disqualified him.

His candidacy was widely seen as a Kremlin political project designed to add some legitimacy to the elections, but it quickly went off the rails when Nadezhdin’s strong anti-war platform struck a chord with voters that turned out in their droves to sign his petition. He collected well over 200,000 names, but the rules limit him to submitting a total of 105,000 for approval.

The Kremlin was widely reported as being unhappy with the surge in popularity for Nadezhdin, who would have won 10% of the vote, according to the most recent polls. The Kremlin feared the elections would be hijacked and turned into a de facto referendum on continuing the war in Ukraine.

The plot thickened after liberal opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported that members of Nadezhdin’s own campaign team injected some 20,000 fake names into the petition submitted to the CEC in an effort to torpedo his application that may have been a Kremlin-sponsored subterfuge to remove him from the race without sparking mass protests.

The CEC confirmed it has officially registered four presidential candidates: Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR); Vladislav Davankov of New People; Nikolay Kharitonov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation; and of course incumbent Russian President Vladimir Putin, running for a fifth term as an independent.

Twenty-five political parties have received the right to participate in the Russian presidential election, Deputy Minister of Justice Oleg Sviridenko said.