Russia has banned a vocal opponent of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine from standing in the presidential election next month after he started gaining too much support.

Russia’s Central Election Commission ruled that five per cent of the 100,000 supporting signatures Boris Nadezhdin submitted to get on the ballot were not legitimate and breached its rules.

It also refused to allow Mr Nadezhdin and his supporters another month to collect more signatures. The Kremlin has declined to comment.

Mr Nadezhdin, 60, said that he would appeal to Russia’s Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.

“This is just the beginning and was expected. We have 10 days to appeal,” he said at a hastily convened press conference in Moscow.

“I ask you not to give up,” Mr Nadezhdin added. “Something happened that many could not believe: citizens sensed the possibility of change in Russia.”

The Kremlin wants to use the presidential election, scheduled for mid-March, to showcase ordinary Russians’ support for Mr Putin’s war in Ukraine and analysts said that it had been wrongfooted by the show of support for Mr Nadezhdin.

Reports across Russia said Russians, banned from protesting directly against the war, had queued up in their hundreds in freezing conditions to support Mr Nadezhdin. Any form of anti-Kremlin activity is considered dangerous in Russia.

Mr Nadezhdin has campaigned against the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine by calling it a “fatal mistake” but he has split opposition opinion with some accusing him of being a Kremlin stooge, used as a “fake opposition candidate” to syphon off support from genuine opponents.

Mr Nadezhdin has appeared regularly on Russian political TV shows as a fall guy to argue against invading Ukraine, allowing Kremlin propagandists to verbally attack him. He also served as an adviser to Sergei Kiriyenko when he was Russian prime minister in 1998.

Mr Kiryenko is now the Kremlin deputy chief of staff and is one of Mr Putin’s most trusted aides and political strategists.

On Twitter, John Foreman, the former British defence attache in Moscow said a “fake candidate had withdrawn from a fake election”.

In 2018, Ksenia Sobchak, the socialite goddaughter of Mr Putin, was alleged to have been placed on the presidential ballot as a fake candidate to draw away genuine opposition.

Even so, despite concerns expressed by some over his legitimacy as a genuine opposition candidate, high-profile supporters of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny have supported Mr Nadezhdin’s candidature.

Mr Nadezhdin had been a candidate for the little-known Civic Initiative party. This meant that he needed to collect 100,000 signatures to be placed on the election ballot.

Yekaterina Duntsova, an anti-war Russian journalist, has also been banned from standing in the election.

Russian opposition media has reported that the Kremlin wants to secure an 80 per cent win for Mr Putin in the election which will set him up to rule until at least 2030, 30 years after he first took power.