Putin’s victory is considered a foregone conclusion, but Boris Nadezhdin’s opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine has won him significant support.

Boris Nadezhdin, a prominent Kremlin critic, has submitted the necessary documents to register as a candidate for Russia’s presidential election in March.

The 60-year-old local councilor who promised to put an end to Russia War in Ukrainesaid on Wednesday he had collected more than 100,000 support signatures in 40 regions and submitted these and other documents to the Central Election Commission (CEC), technically enough to challenge President Vladimir Putin.

Next, election officials will verify the authenticity of the signatures submitted by Nadezhdin and other potential candidates and announce next month who will join Putin on the ballot for the March 15-17 election.

The Electoral College has exposed what it claimed in the past irregularities in signatures or documents collected from some candidates and disqualified them.

Putin, who will run as an independent candidate rather than the ruling United Russia party, needs 300,000 signatures but has already collected more than 3.5 million, according to his supporters.

In December, the 71-year-old incumbent announced his decision to seek an extension of his rule. He is almost certain to win a fifth term as president, extending his 24 years of leadership of Russia, including eight years as prime minister.

Nadezhdin, who criticized the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a “fatal mistake,” was born in Soviet-ruled Uzbekistan to a Jewish mother who was a music teacher and whose father was a physicist.

He has been active in Russian politics for the past 30 years, working as a city councilor in the town of Dolgoprudny outside Moscow. He will run for the citizens’ initiative.

He gained notoriety with his calls to end the war, drawing crowds of Russians across the country eager to sign his bid to get on the ballot.

After a series of heating outages across Russia during an unusually cold winter, Nadezhdin said earlier this month that the country could afford to spend more on its citizens if it did not pour so much money into the military.

In an interview with the AFP news agency, he described the war as “catastrophic” and said he wanted to free “political prisoners” in Russia.

“This is my pride,” he said of the signatures collected, thanking his supporters in a statement posted on his official Telegram account.

“The work of thousands of people who go without sleep for many days. The result of the queues in which you stood in the cold lies in the boxes. It will be very difficult for the CEC and the authorities to say, ‘I didn’t notice the elephant in the room’!”

He also released a video from the CEC headquarters that showed papers with signatures stacked on tables for officials to review. The region from which each stack came was described.

Nadezhdin’s offer raises questions about how far the Kremlin would let him go at a time when speaking out against the conflict is politically sensitive, often leading to critics being sent to prison.

In his 24 years of rule, Putin has not allowed real electoral opposition with rivals like the opposition leader Alexei Navalny behind bars.

Navalny’s wife Yulia signed her name in support of Nadezhdin in a symbolic photo posted by an ally of the jailed critic.