Don't expect many surprises in local and regional elections being held across Russia -- and, problematically, in occupied Ukraine. Do look for clues as to how the Kremlin will orchestrate next year's presidential vote, when Vladimir Putin is expected to run yet again.
In dozens of regions across Russia, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are choosing local mayors, local legislatures, regional governors, city councils, and even a handful of members of Russia's lower house of parliament.
September 10 is the day designated for in-person ballot casting, while in some regions, people have been voting early.
Those regions include four in Ukraine that are partially occupied by Russian military forces, an effort that has been internationally derided. The Council of Europe called the effort to hold a vote in war-ravaged Ukrainian territories, where millions of people have been displaced, "an illusion of democracy." The United States called it "nothing more than a propaganda exercise."
Russia's elections mostly lost the veneer of free and fair competition years ago, as the Kremlin, to achieve target results, moved away from what one adviser once called "managed democracy" to outright vote manipulation, last-minute rule changes, the use of "municipal filters," and lavish coverage on state-controlled media.
A woman exits a voting booth at a polling station in Donetsk on September 8.
What this means is that this weekend's local voting is, as the embattled election monitoring watchdog Golos described it, "very tranquil, much like a graveyard."
"The Kremlin wants to maintain the sense of normalcy and stability in the context of war, social tension, and anxiety," said Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, director of King's College Russia Institute in London. "Elections are one such mechanism to signal to the population that things are calm, normal, stable…. [But] if drastic measures are introduced -- such as canceling elections -- the signal might be 'Hell is breaking loose.' "
"These elections mark an important milestone in the metamorphoses of Putin's vertical power structure," Andrei Pertsev, a journalist and close watcher of Kremlin politics, wrote in an analysis. "The system is returning to Soviet practices of 'partisanization' of the bureaucracy."
Here are four things to know about the elections:
What Officials Say Is Going On (And What Is Really Going On)
Balloting is happening across 85 regions across Russia and occupied Ukraine (more on that later). Many of the elections are happening at a local level: people choosing city councilors or members of regional legislatures.
In 22 regions and federal districts, governors or mayors are being chosen. Governors tend to have substantial authority in managing the affairs of their regions, though not unfettered. As with all elections, the Presidential Administration -- a powerful, domestic policy-making executive body within the Kremlin apparatus -- tries to keep close tabs on which governors are effective, which are loyal, which are despised, and which are corrupt, for example.
The mayoralty for Moscow is one of the most powerful elected positions in the country. Sergei Sobyanin, a Kremlin loyalist who is seen as an effective bureaucrat, is all but certain to win reelection.
Sergei Sobyanin
The oddities of the Russian political system that evolved under "managed democracy" mean that there is United Russia, which dominates the country's political scene and controls both houses of the national parliament. There are also four parties dubbed "systemic opposition" -- parties that are supposed to challenge or oppose United Russia or Kremlin initiatives but rarely do so in a substantive way.
Candidates for those parties -- the Communists, the Liberal Democrats, A Just Russia, and New People -- are running in most of the local elections.
The liberal party Yabloko party used to be a "systemic opposition" party, but the Kremlin engineered the system to push the bloc out of national representation.
What about the "nonsystemic opposition," you ask?
Those are considered political figures and groups who are basically barred from fielding candidates, running campaigns, registering, or anything else that might allow them to participate in a meaningful way. Corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny is the best example. He spent years building a national movement, tapping into Russians' frustration with corruption and graft. He and his team also built a system called "Smart Vote," which aims to identify and endorse candidates who have the best chance at beating United Russia candidates -- at the national and local levels.
People walk passed a billboard of a United Russia party poster that reads: "For Donbas, where you want to live!" prior to local elections in Donetsk, the capital of the Ukraine's Donetsk region, on September 7.
For his persistent efforts, Navalny ended up nearly dying after being exposed to a powerful Soviet-era nerve agent and then being thrown in prison on what his allies say are politically trumped-up charges. He's been all but silenced.
"We see the same direction toward further safe-proofing the elections in terms of predictability of their results," Sharafutdinova said in an e-mail. "Over the last years, the system was evolving in terms of widening the window for the authorities to control the outcomes -- [by] increasing the days when voting is allowed and through electronic voting."
"They have seen it work and this is what is being used even more this time," she said.
Voting In Occupied Ukraine
For some of those paying close attention, the voting in four partially occupied regions of Ukraine is the focus. But not because people are on the edges of their seats, expecting the effort to be fair, competitive, or free of manipulation.
Last year, seven months after the start of the February 2022 full-scale invasion, the Kremlin declared four regions of Ukraine -- Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson -- annexed and a part of Russia after a referendum vote that the Kremlin professed was an expression of voters' true will.
Never mind that the regions are only partially occupied by Russian forces, with Russian-installed proxy administrators. And never mind that nearly 6 million people have been displaced across Ukraine by the war -- scattered mostly across the rest of Ukraine, Europe, and Russia -- with a good proportion of them coming from the partially occupied regions.
In the voting that kicked off on September 8, people in the occupied Ukrainian regions will choose regional legislatures, which in turn will appoint regional governors. There are also dozens of local councils being chosen throughout the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and hundreds of candidates are competing for those seats.
While some of those who have remained in the Russian-occupied regions are genuinely supportive of being part of Russia, and voting in local elections, others who have remained say it's impossible to conduct free and fair elections under military occupation.
"When there's an armed person standing in front of you, it's hard to say no," Ivan Fyodorov, the Ukrainian mayor of the Russian-controlled southern city of Melitopol, told The Associated Press.
So, No Surprises At All Then?
Far from Russia's center of gravity -- Moscow and, to a lesser degree, St. Petersburg -- local issues do still animate voters, who sometimes thwart the intentions of Kremlin election planners, or United Russia.
Protests over a controversial landfill in the northern Arkhangelsk region led to the resignation of the local governor there in 2020 and a new governor who pledged to halt the project.
In 2018, in the Far Eastern region of Khabarovsk, voters bucked Moscow's wishes and elected a popular local official, Sergei Furgal. But Furgal ended up being arrested two years into his term on what many saw as politically motivated charges. He was whisked off to Moscow and earlier this year was sentenced to 22 years in prison on murder charges.
Former Khabarovsk regional Governor Sergei Furgal attends a court hearing in Moscow in March 2021.
Also in 2018, controversial government plans to overhaul the country's pension system sparked widespread protests and led to the shuffle of several governors that had been preferred by Moscow.
The region that experts are watching closely this year is Khakassia, located in southern Siberia, about a five-hour flight from Moscow. There, in 2018, Communist Valentin Konovalov rode the resentment over the pension reforms to win victory as governor of the remote region. His victory came despite eyebrow-raising maneuvering among his competitors.
This year, United Russia picked a veteran of the Ukraine war to challenge Konovalov. But last week, just eight days before in-person balloting began, the candidate, Sergei Sokol, withdrew citing illness. According to Pertsev, the Presidential Administration has considered canceling the Khakassia election on a sham pretense.
Electronic voting -- people casting ballots online through a nominally secure web portal -- is one tool that election officials have tried to harness, though many Russians, already jaded by past practices of ballot-box stuffing or "carousel voting," are deeply skeptical.
Officials have also used other tools to achieve results: cajoling public sector workers to vote, increasing local social welfare subsidies, arresting independent activists on flimsy charges. "Municipal filters" is the short-hand term to describe bureaucratic hurdles put in place to make it harder for prospective candidates to collect signatures of endorsement.
Protesters attend a rally titled "Mariupol Is Ukraine" against Russia's illegal so-called referendums in the parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia, in Kyiv on September 24, 2022.
"For now, it is clear that [the Presidential Administration] is using regional elections to explore what works well in ensuring control and stability," Sharafutdinova said.
Tinkering with the system has gotten harder, as election watchdog Golos argued, and that was even before Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"They are forced to more and more limit the real participation of Russian residents in political decision-making, even at the level of issues of local and regional significance," the organization said. "As a result, significant groups of voters feel separated from public politics. All this leads to people's disillusionment with legal politics, the consequences of which we saw in Rostov-on-Don during the June uprising" -- a reference to the brief mutiny launched by the late Wagner Group mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.
What About Putin?
For the moment, the biggest uncertainty hanging over next March's presidential election is whether Putin will actually run again. He's allowed to, thanks to controversial constitutional amendments that were rammed through parliament and endorsed by voters in 2020.
At this stage, 18 months into the biggest land war in Europe since World War II, a war that is estimated to have killed and wounded more than 100,000 Russian troops, the likelihood of Putin bowing out is seen as incredibly remote. Moreover, stepping aside at this stage, without laying the groundwork for a successor, might spark instability and political chaos, which would endanger the war effort.
The "special military operation" in Ukraine -- the euphemism Russians use, along with the acronym SVO -- is expected to be a prominent, if not dominant, element of the presidential campaign, Russian political experts have said, though it's unclear if it will focus on extolling the soldiers fighting or supporting the widows and children of those maimed and wounded in the war.
In regional elections, United Russia has tapped 117 veterans of the war to be candidates on various ballots, according to one tally. In the central Volga region of Samara, an online ad exhorting people to vote featured wives of soldiers circulated on local channels and social media pages.
The war "has become a factor directly influencing the electoral agenda and the course of election campaigns," political analyst Aleksandr Asafov wrote in an analytical piece online. "Today there is a steady trend: SVO participants, their wives, mothers, and other people, one way or another connected with the special military operation, enjoy increasing public support."
Other glimpses of the goals the Presidential Administration, which is led by Sergei Kiriyenko, a once liberal-minded prime minister who is now a committed architect of Putinism, intends to pursue came earlier this year in a report by the Kommersant newspaper. The administration came up with nationwide voting targets: 70 percent turnout among all Russian voters and a 75 percent vote for the winning candidate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on September 8
"The Kremlin sees no problems with achieving new goals. The president's support is high, [and] the main thing is the legitimacy of the campaign," one unnamed source was quoted by Kommersant as saying.
Indeed, a July opinion poll taken by the Levada Center, which is considered one of the last independent pollsters in Russia, showed that nearly 70 percent of Russians thought Putin should continue as president after the end of his current term. Unnamed officials told the online news site Meduza that administration officials want Putin to receive 80 percent of the winning vote.
"This election will essentially be a referendum on confidence," said Andrei Kolesnikov, a political commentator at the U.S.-based Carnegie Endowment For International Peace.
"Indeed, it seems to me that in these circumstances, the Kremlin can count on fairly high figures, more than before, because all this will take place under the circumstances of a 'special military operation.' And in military circumstances, people tend to support the leader who wages the war itself," he told Current Time, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Mikhail Svetov, an opposition blogger and leader of a libertarian political party, argued Russians should go to vote, just as Jews pray at Jerusalem's Western Wall, a holy site that is believed to be a remnant of a Jewish temple destroyed some 2,000 years ago.
"There is no temple, but there is a Western Wall, and Jews went to this wall for 2,000 years and as a result the state of Israel appeared," he said in a Telegram post.
"Russian people should treat going to the polling stations the same way," he wrote. "There is no temple, there are no elections, but we need to go to the polling stations, because only by preserving the symbol and memory of what is due, we will be able to return Russia to ourselves."