Russia Holds First Wartime Parliamentary Vote — SkimNews
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- Russia's parliamentary election began Friday as a three-day vote among 111 million eligible voters, with turnout at about 30% by late Friday including online balloting, per the Central Election Commission, as authorities spread voting across the weekend to boost participation.
- United Russia is all but assured to retain control of the 450-seat State Duma, while the liberal Yabloko party — the only registered party that openly criticized the war — was removed from the ballot by Russia's Supreme Court last month, with anti-war politicians jailed or forced into exile.
- Vladimir Putin voted online and told the nation their choice would "demonstrate that millions of people stand behind our fighters," explicitly tying the vote to support for the war in Ukraine.
- For the first time, voting extended into occupied Ukrainian territories — four regions Moscow illegally annexed after 2022 but does not fully control, plus Crimea (annexed 2014); the EU called the voting "illegal" and "sham elections" constituting "a blatant violation of international law."
- Ukrainian drone attacks directly disrupted the vote: polling stations in Sochi briefly closed over a drone threat, one Krasnodar station had to relocate after a drone shattered its windows, and 14 Luhansk stations ran on backup power after Ukrainian drones damaged electrical lines.
- Russian officials said Ukrainian attacks earlier in the week killed a polling station chief and wounded another in Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia; Kyiv had no immediate comment.
- The election follows a summer of Ukrainian long-range drone strikes on Russian oil refineries that triggered a widespread fuel crisis, compounded by attacks on warehouses of online retailers Wildberries and Ozon that brought the war's economic costs home to ordinary Russians.
Why it matters: With Yabloko barred and opposition figures jailed or exiled, the election's only function is to manufacture a domestic mandate for the war — and by extending voting into occupied Ukrainian territories, Moscow uses the ballot box to formalize its annexation claims. That Ukrainian drones forced actual polling station closures, relocations, and backup power operations shows the staged vote is being physically contested on the ground even as the Kremlin presents it as legitimate.
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