Thousands of Russians queued for hours in the freezing cold across the country over the past few days to show their support for an anti-war candidate before this year’s stage-managed presidential ballot in which Vladimir Putin is the only permitted winner. Boris Nadezhdin, a centre-right candidate who has called himself a “principled opponent” of the war, has said in his manifesto that Putin made a “fatal mistake by starting the special military operation”, the Kremlin’s preferred term for its invasion. “Putin sees the world from the past and is dragging Russia into the past.” As the end-of-the-month deadline approached for Nadezhdin to collect the necessary 100,000 signatures to appear on the ballot for the elections in March, social media posts showed Russians joining long lines to give their signatures in cities across the country. Nadezhdin is a decades-long veteran of Russian politics, with a history of ties to Kremlin insiders, including Putin’s domestic politics curator, Sergei Kiriyenko, and some of its most pointed critics, such as the slain opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. Nadezhdin is a rare critical voice allowed to appear on the shouty chatshows that dominate state TV, playing the role of token opposition that some have said maintains the fiction of competition in Russia. Now, those critics see him as a spoiler in an election otherwise devoid of drama. But for anti-war Russians there is no one else. And his last-second dash to collect 100,000 signatures and get on the ballot for March’s election has invigorated a moribund opposition as Putin marches toward a fifth term in the Kremlin. “I don’t have any illusions about Nadezdhin or whether he has a chance to win,” said Natalya, who described queueing for an hour in the cold on Sunday alongside young people and families with children. “But even if we get him on the ballot, it will feel like a little victory.” Little victories are all that the country’s opposition appears capable of at the moment. Public protest against the war has virtually evaporated as police are quick to stop demonstrations, and hundreds of outspoken critics of the war have been jailed while thousands more have fled the country. For most Russians, the war has faded into the background of daily life. “It was cool to stand in a line like that, people were making jokes and the mood was generally good,” she said. “I used to go to protests before February 2022, but now that is impossible of course. You quickly forget that at one point there were thousands of people on the street.” Nadezhdin’s campaign said on Monday that they had collected more than 200,000 signatures – twice as many as he needs to officially join the race. But the authorities could still refuse to put him on the ballot by deeming tens of thousands of signatures as invalid, a tactic previously used with other opposition candidates. Nadezhdin’s is not the first anti-war candidacy to appear in this Russian election cycle. Yekaterina Duntsova, a Russian TV journalist, had submitted documents to run as an independent candidate for president when she was disqualified by the Russian central elections commission last month. She has since announced her support for Nadezhdin’s campaign. “As the opposition, we need to look for common ground and not for conflicts,” she said of her decision to support Nadezhdin. “Our common ground is the desire for peace. And that’s my priority. And then time will tell.” She defended participation in Russia’s carefully controlled elections, calling it a “training for Russia’s civil society”. “The elections will count no matter who comes or doesn’t come,” she said. “The state employees, the military, the prisons, the retirement homes will all vote at nearly 100% turnout … if we don’t go to the elections, we’ll be abandoning it.” Yet Russian political realities are changing and Nadezhdin’s criticism of the invasion, including meetings with women calling for Putin to return their husbands from the front and end the war, have angered Russia’s pro-war political elite. Since launching his bid, Nadezhdin has also courted the support of Russia’s “non-systemic opposition”, in particular allies of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a third rail of Russian politics who was banished last month to an Arctic prison because of his strong criticism of Putin. Duntsova said Nadezhdin had allowed himself to be “more outspoken” than her campaign because “he has spent more time in federal politics and has more relations with the various levels of government … he can feel more liberated in that sense.” From prison, Navalny said he would put his signature down for Nadezhdin’s presidential run, and his wife, Yulia, was photographed on Wednesday signing in support of Nadezhdin’s candidacy for president. “From the start of the election, our main focus was to campaign against Putin,” said Ruslan Shaveddinov, a close ally of Navalny’s. “Nadezhdin criticises the war and also, somewhat carefully, criticises the government … He is not an ideal candidate, but many see him as a vehicle to voice their opposition against the government.” He added: “Standing in line and supporting Nadezhdin is a safe way to protest and we support that.” The Kremlin has so far disregarded Nadezhdin’s candidacy, saying he does not pose an electoral threat. “We do not see him as a rival,” said Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, who declined to comment when asked whether Nadezhdin’s campaign was “coordinated” with the Kremlin. In a widely expected move, Russia’s central election commission on Monday recognised Putin as a candidate for the presidential elections in March. Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst and founder of the political analysis firm R.Politik, said Nadezhdin was probably permitted to try (and fail) to collect signatures for the elections to “show the hopelessness of the anti-war agenda. And they made a mistake … they didn’t understand he would start to play not by the rules.” She said “Nadezhdin is their own guy, they know him from back to front”, noting that he likely gave advance notice to his political contacts, including Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s domestic politics tsar, of his plans to run for president. “He was expected to play by the rules.” But his openness to working with Navalny supporters and other actions had “poured gas on the fire of the non-systemic opposition”, Stanovaya said, referring to a set of political campaigners who have virtually been outlawed since the war began. She said Nadezhdin’s bid would probably be rejected when he submits his signatures to the elections commission in the coming days. Blocking Nadezhdin’s run “is not a problem for the Kremlin”, she said. Putin, meanwhile, would demand to see a crushing victory in the elections worthy of a ruler fighting an offensive war. “He needs to show overwhelming support,” Stanovaya said of Putin. “He wants the elections to prove that the country stands behind him.”