Voting begins in three-day Russian parliamentary election — SkimNews
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- Russia launched a three-day parliamentary election Friday with about 30% turnout by late Friday among 111 million eligible voters, including online ballots cast by President Putin himself.
- United Russia is all but assured to retain control of the 450-seat State Duma, while the Yabloko party — the only registered party that criticized the war — was removed from the ballot by Russia's Supreme Court last month.
- For the first time, voting extended to residents of four Ukrainian regions Russia illegally annexed, plus Crimea; armed Russian soldiers stood guard at a Donetsk polling station.
- Ukrainian drone attacks forced Sochi polling stations to briefly close, shattered windows at a Krasnodar station, and left 14 Luhansk stations on backup power; Russian officials said a polling chief was killed and another wounded in Zaporizhzhia.
- EU spokesperson Christian Wigand called voting in Russian-held Ukrainian regions "sham elections" and said the bloc would never recognize the results; Russia held the vote without OSCE observers.
- Voters gave differing hopes to AP reporters: ending the war, narrowing inequality, or backing the government's "important initiatives" and seeking "victory."
Why it matters: With the only anti-war party banned and OSCE observers excluded, the vote operates less as a competitive election than as a managed display of wartime unity — and by extending ballots into occupied Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin uses the ballot box to formalize territorial claims on land it does not fully control, even as Ukrainian drones physically disrupted the polling itself.
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