The United Russia party, led by President Vladimir Putin, has recorded a new historic success in the elections held on September 21, which the European Union has called a manipulated show. According to data from the Central Election Commission, the ruling party received approximately 58 percent of the vote, thus securing 355 of the 450 seats in the State Duma, in the first parliamentary vote since the start of the full-scale aggression against Ukraine in February 2022.
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The three-day process, organized under strict control, offered citizens the opportunity to choose between several political forces that enjoy the Kremlin’s approval and unreservedly support Putin’s line. According to the results, a significant number of war veterans from Ukraine will now occupy seats in parliament.
The only formation that spoke out against the conflict, Yabloko, was not allowed to participate in the race. Its leader, Nikolai Rybakov, wrote the word “peace” on the ballot with a highlighted pencil and was photographed with it at a polling station in St. Petersburg.
A large part of the real Russian opposition is currently behind bars or abroad. Dmitry Gudkov, part of the exiled group Russian Democratic Forces in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, told Current Time that none of the real opponents qualified, independent observers were excluded, and open vote manipulation was obvious. He added that he expects PACE to soon declare the elections illegal.
The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, has already made such an assessment, highlighting the fact that the vote also included Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation. In a statement on social media, she described the elections as a severe blow to what remains of democracy in Russia and announced a proposal for sanctions against those who enabled this farce in the annexed regions of Ukraine.
Turnout was reported to be 59.32 percent, a growing figure, which the head of the Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, emphasized. In the previous elections of 2021, turnout was 51.7 percent, while in 2011, when suspicions of manipulation brought thousands of protesters into the streets in Moscow, it was 60.2 percent. However, the credibility of these figures is widely questioned. The case of Chechnya, where authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov reportedly received 99.85 percent of the vote, is seen as an extreme example. Maksim Glikin, editor-in-chief of the exiled publication Mozhem Obyasnit, asserted that in this republic there is not even talk of falsification, as the results are simply fabricated and published without any real counting.
Despite everything, the result is a Lower House that will automatically vote for the Kremlin’s bills. Now attention shifts again to the war front. On the eve of the elections, rumors circulated that they would be followed by a new round of mobilization to compensate for losses estimated at around 30,000 soldiers per month. Dominika Hajdu from the GLOBSEC institute said that Ukrainian intelligence services warn that the Kremlin intends to use this orchestrated show of support to launch a new call to arms, but added that the effect on the battlefield will be limited, as the conflict is increasingly being determined by drone technology and air power.
Meanwhile, hostilities continue. Russian forces struck a university, a shopping center, and other targets in Zaporizhzhia, leaving six people wounded. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Moscow is open to resuming trilateral peace talks, but added that the “special military operation” is ongoing. On the other hand, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he has spoken with his American counterpart Donald Trump and that the two will meet during the week at the UN General Assembly, a meeting that, according to Zelensky, could bring significant changes.
