The United Russia party is on track to win Sunday’s tightly controlled Russian parliamentary elections, as President Vladimir Putin looks set to once again consolidate his dominance in domestic politics.
Final election results will not be tallied until September 25, but preliminary data from the Central Election Commission shows President Putin’s United Russia Party in the lead with 57.8% of the vote and 95% of the total votes cast.
The vote came as Kiev launched one of its biggest attacks against Moscow overnight in the run-up to Sunday, the final day of a three-day election. More than 1,900 drones were launched, killing at least three people and damaging a major oil refinery.
Although the election result was not in doubt, voter participation could be seen as a test of support for the Ukraine war.
Voter turnout across Russia was over 59%, the highest ever for a parliamentary election, according to the commission.
If approved, the result would give United Russia 355 of the 450 seats in Russia’s lower house of parliament. This is the highest number of seats the party has ever won, and 31 more than in the last election in 2021, when United Russia won before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
President Putin served as party leader from 2008 to 2012, but is not a member.
As a sitting president, Putin is not on the ballot. He won the most recent presidential election in 2024 with just under 88.5% of the vote, and will not run again until 2030.
There is virtually no meaningful opposition movement in Russia, and critics are arrested, imprisoned, or exiled. According to the independent human rights monitoring group OVD-Info, more than 2,000 people are currently imprisoned for political reasons.
Russia’s only registered anti-war party, Yabloko (Russian for “Apple”), was temporarily allowed to participate in last month’s federal party list elections until it was blocked by the Supreme Court.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ban on the party’s main national list, some Yabloko candidates were allowed to run in local single-seat constituencies. However, these candidates faced significant restrictions and pressures. Two of the party’s deputy leaders were recently jailed on charges related to their anti-war stance and social media posts. According to the preliminary results announced by the commission, candidate Yabloko was not selected.
Yabloko announced on Saturday that one of the election observers had “lost consciousness” while being detained at a polling station in St. Petersburg. A number of other Yabloko observers announced they were banned from entering polling stations elsewhere.
The election results are likely to be used by the Kremlin to assert more authority, saying it shows the Russian public’s support for President Putin and what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Ahead of the vote, President Putin suggested in a televised address to the nation that the election results would show Russians united behind the military.
“Your choices and determination will demonstrate once again that millions of people support our fighters and that we are united and united by common values, historical memory and love for the Motherland,” Putin said.
Observers will focus more on turnout than on the actual outcome as an indicator of how Russians feel about the war and Russia’s political direction.
The poll ended on Sunday after three days of voting in Russia’s 11 time zones and at Russian embassies and consulates abroad.
People living in areas of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia were also asked to vote, with new constituencies added to Moscow-controlled areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions.
Ukraine has rejected elections on its territory as a “travesty”.
The European Union accused Russia of holding what it called “sham elections” in the occupied territories and said it would impose sanctions on those who facilitated the elections.
“The so-called Duma election was another major setback for Russian democracy. There was no doubt about its outcome. The Kremlin silenced the opposition, shut out the only registered political party opposed to the war in Ukraine, and shut out international election observers,” Kaja Karas, the EU’s foreign representative, said in a statement.
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement condemning the vote in occupied Ukraine as a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty.
As the election progressed, Russia continued to attack its neighbors. According to Kiev, the Russian government launched hundreds of drones and several missiles against Ukrainian cities during the election period.
Online and electronic voting was widely available and encouraged this time around, after the option was introduced in the last election in 2021. Moscow even offered incentives in the form of points for prizes if residents chose electronic voting over paper voting.
Some voters in Moscow told Russian independent news outlet Sotavision that they were not issued paper ballots due to a “malfunction” and were encouraged to vote via electronic terminals instead. “They did this on purpose, bastards,” one voter told SotaVision.
Critics have long questioned the Kremlin’s introduction of electronic voting because they say it lacks transparency. Russian authorities reject criticism of the electoral process and insist the elections will be held in accordance with the law.
Putin himself chose to vote online, and the Kremlin released a video showing him manipulating the online system to vote.
Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported that electronic voting systems in Moscow suffered outages and malfunctions between Friday and Saturday, with Central Election Commission head Ela Panfilova saying this was due to a “very large-scale and violent” attack.
Pamfilova said more than 3,000 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on election infrastructure were recorded during the election period.
Panfilova said 74 election commission buildings were damaged or destroyed in 10 regions during the voting period.
According to the commission, remote electronic voting systems were attacked 135 times, Rostelecom’s network was attacked 420 times and government electronic infrastructure was attacked nearly 2,000 times.
