Pro-Putin United Russia Party Set to Secure Landmark Victory in Controlled Parliamentary Elections Amid War

The United Russia party is easily on track to win Sunday’s tightly controlled Russian parliamentary elections, with President Vladimir Putin once again set to cement his dominance over domestic politics. Final election results will not be tallied before September 25, but according to initial data from the Central Election Commission the United Russia party – which backs Putin – is in the lead with 57.8% of votes and 95% of the ballots processed.

The vote came as Kyiv launched one of its largest attacks against Moscow overnight into Sunday, the final day of the three-day election. More than 1,900 drones were launched, killing at least three people and damaging a major oil refinery. Although the result of the election was not in doubt, voter participation could be seen as a test of support for the war in Ukraine. The commission said that overall turnout across Russia topped 59%, a new record high for parliamentary elections.

If confirmed, the result will give United Russia 355 of the 450 seats in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. That is the highest number of seats the party has ever secured and 31 more than it got in the last election in 2021 – before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when United Russia took 324.

Putin is not a member of the party, although he served as its leader between 2008 and 2012. As the sitting president, Putin was not on the ballot. He is not up for election until 2030, having won the most recent presidential election in 2024 with just under 88.5% of the vote.

Meaningful opposition is effectively nonexistent in Russia, with critics either barred, in jail or exiled abroad. According to the independent human rights monitor OVD-Info, more than 2,000 people are currently in prison for political reasons. Russia’s only registered anti-war party, Yabloko – “Apple” in Russian – was briefly allowed to take part before being barred by the Supreme Court last month from the federal party-lists election.

Some individual Yabloko candidates were allowed to run in single-seat local districts, even though the Supreme Court banned the party’s main national list. But these candidates faced significant restrictions and pressures. Two of the party’s deputy leaders were recently imprisoned on charges related to their anti-war stances and social media posts. No Yabloko candidates were elected, according to the preliminary results announced by the commission.

Yabloko said on Saturday that one of its election observers “lost consciousness” while being detained at a polling station in St. Petersburg. It said numerous other Yabloko observers were barred from polling stations elsewhere.

The outcome of the election is likely to be used by the Kremlin to claim a stronger mandate, saying it illustrates Russians’ support for Putin and what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine. Ahead of the vote, Putin signaled in a televised speech to the nation that the election results will show Russians are united behind the army.

Polls closed on Sunday after three days of voting across Russia’s 11 time zones and at Russian embassies and consulates abroad. People living in areas of Ukraine that are currently occupied by Russia were also asked to vote, with new constituencies added for Moscow-controlled parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Ukraine rejected the elections taking place in its territory, calling them a “farce.” The European Union condemned Russia for holding what it called “sham elections” in the occupied territories and said it would sanction those who facilitated them. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the UK issued a joint statement condemning the voting in occupied Ukraine, saying it breached Ukraine’s sovereignty. As the elections unfolded, Russia continued to attack its neighbor, with Moscow firing hundreds of drones and several missiles against Ukrainian cities over the election period.

After debuting the option during the last election in 2021, online and electronic voting was widely available – and encouraged – this time around. Moscow went as far as offering its residents incentives in the form of points for prizes if they chose to vote electronically instead of casting a paper ballot. Critics have long been suspicious of the Kremlin’s introduction of electronic voting because they argue it’s less transparent. Russian authorities reject criticism of their electoral processes and insist elections are held in accordance with the law.

Russian state news agency TASS reported outages and malfunctions of the electronic voting system in Moscow on Friday into Saturday, quoting Central Election Commission chair Ella Pamfilova as saying this was due to a “very large-scale and intense” attack. During the elections, more than 3,000 waves of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks on election infrastructure were recorded, according to Pamfilova.