Officials in Moscow have announced a new record victory for President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in what the European Union dismissed as “sham elections” on September 21.
The Central Election Commission said United Russia gained nearly 58 percent of the vote, winning 355 seats in the 450-seat State Duma in the first election to the body since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
In a highly managed process on September 18-20, voters could choose from several parties that are all approved by the Kremlin and fully support Putin. Results showed dozens of Ukraine-war military veterans will now be lawmakers.
The only party opposing the war on Ukraine, Yabloko, was excluded from the poll. Its leader, Nikolai Rybakov, scrawled “for peace” on his ballot with a bright marker pen and posed with it for photographers at a polling station in St. Petersburg.
'Setback For Russian Democracy'
Most of Russia’s political opposition is now in prison or in exile. Dmitry Gudkov, in the latter group, told Current Time “they didn’t let anyone [from the opposition] run, they kicked out election observers, there was clearly widespread ballot stuffing.”
Gudkov is a member of the Russian Democratic Forces, an exile opposition group at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). He said he believed it would soon declare the Duma elections illegitimate.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has already done so, noting among other things that voting also took place in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
“The so-called Duma elections marked another major setback for Russian democracy,” she wrote in a social media post on September 21. “The veneer of democracy is all that remains in Russia. I have proposed measures against those facilitating these sham elections in occupied Ukrainian territories.”
Turnout was given at 59.32 percent, an uptick on previous years that was trumpeted by election commission chief Ella Pamfilova.
Last time round, in 2021, it was 51.7 percent, while in 2011 -- when allegations of electoral fraud led to huge opposition protests in Moscow being brutally suppressed by security forces -- the figure was 60.2 percent.
The reliability of official figures has been widely questioned, however, with examples such as Chechnya --where longstanding regional boss Ramzan Kadyrov was recorded as receiving 99.85 percent of the vote -- seen as particularly glaring.
“In Chechnya, it’s not even mass falsification. Nobody even counts any votes,” Maksim Glikin, chief editor of exile publication Mozhem Obyasnit, told Current Time. “They just write down the required numbers and put them out.”
What Now?
In any case, the elections have once again delivered a pliant Duma that will rubber stamp legislation submitted to it by the Kremlin -- as was generally expected. Attention now returns to the brutal war of attrition in Ukraine.
In the weeks preceding the poll, there was widespread speculation that it would be followed by a new wave of mobilization to boost army ranks that are reported to suffer some 30,000 casualties every month.
“Ukrainian intelligence have warned that the Kremlin plans to use the parliamentary elections as a stage-managed show of public support to launch a new wave of mobilization,” Dominika Hajdu, director for policy and programming at GLOBSEC, a think tank, told RFE/RL.
“The mobilization would help Russia sustain its offensive pressure, given its willingness to absorb high casualties, but its battlefield impact will likely be limited, as recent fighting has been shaped mainly by drones and air-strike capabilities rather than manpower alone,” she added.
Fighting continued with Russian strikes on a university, a shopping center, and other facilities injuring six people in Zaporizhzhya, according to Ukrainian emergency services on September 21.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia was open to reopening trilateral peace talks but that “we are continuing the special military operation” -- a preferred term used by officials to describe the invasion.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said late on September 20 that he’d spoken with US President Donald Trump and that the two would meet at the UN General Assembly this week.
In a social media post, Zelenskyy said the meeting "could change a lot" and that he and Trump "got through a lot" during their discussion.
