“I have proposed measures against those facilitating these sham elections in occupied Ukrainian territories,” she added. Residents of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — regions that the Kremlin unlawfully occupied after the 2022 assault started — also took part in the vote, with some reportedly coerced into doing so.
The war in Ukraine featured heavily in the elections, which were marked by severe repression. Dissenting voices were all but silenced, and Yabloko — the country’s only openly anti-war party — was banned from fielding a national list of candidates in the State Duma.
“A party that has not been represented in the country’s parliament for 23 years [would have] secured second place in the polls, given the conditions in which we operate,” said Yabloko leader Nikolai Rybakov following the elections. “And the authorities could do nothing about it other than remove the party from the election.”
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said of the results: “The citizens of our country maintain their trust in our leading political force [Putin’s party] and consider it appropriate to continue entrusting it with governance at various levels of state authority.”