Sorry, Moscow Duma candidates. No televised debates for you.

State Duma candidates running in the Moscow region won't be getting televised debates, thanks to a new ruling by Moscow Municipal Election Commission.

By law, all the candidates in the Moscow race are allotted a total of 300 minutes for debates on television. There are so many candidates this year, however, that each individual would only have had 100 seconds to make a speech, which violates an election statute that says TV debates can't take place if candidates have less than five minutes each.

Representatives from the Communist Party and the opposition party “Parnas” told the newspaper Vedomosti that the absence of televised debates would be advantageous for candidates from the pro-Kremlin United Russia party.