Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has won a record supermajority in parliament, preliminary results showed Monday. The tightly controlled three-day vote excluded every party critical of the Kremlin or the war in Ukraine.
Central Election Commission chief Ella Pamfilova said United Russia had secured 355 of the State Duma’s 450 seats. That beats its previous record of 343, set in 2016, and is well above the 301 needed to change the constitution. Final results are due later this week.
The Communist Party came second with 40 seats, followed by the nationalist LDPR on 25, New People on 20 and A Just Russia on four. Pamfilova put turnout at more than 59 percent.
It was Russia’s first parliamentary election since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Criticism of the war is banned, and Yabloko, the only party calling for an end to the fighting, was barred from running for the national parliament, though it was allowed to stand in some regional votes.
“These indicators, of course, point to the highest level of consolidation within Russian society around the head of state,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
United Russia told state media that 49 veterans who fought in Ukraine are expected to enter the Duma for the party.
Voting also took place in occupied parts of Ukraine, including Crimea and the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
On Sunday, the final day of voting, Kyiv hit Moscow with its biggest drone attack of the war, killing two people and setting an oil refinery ablaze. Russia’s defence ministry accused Ukraine of trying to disrupt the vote and vowed to intensify strikes on Kyiv.
Russia’s ‘veneer of democracy’
The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, said the Kremlin had “silenced dissent” and shut out international election monitors.
“The veneer of democracy is all that remains in Russia,” she said. “The State Duma elections held by Russia on 18–20 September underscored the continued and deepening erosion of democracy in Russia, taking place in an increasingly authoritarian political environment.”
In a statement on behalf of the bloc, Kallas said the EU would impose sanctions on those who organised the vote or stood as candidates in occupied Ukrainian territory.
“The European Union reiterates that it does not and will never recognise either the holding of these so-called “elections” in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine or their results.” the statement said.
Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway said in a joint statement that holding the election in occupied areas was a “gross violation” of Ukraine’s sovereignty and the UN Charter. They said the vote could not change the status of those territories under international law.
“These sham elections are part of a wider system of occupation: the imposition of Russian administration, law, media, education, language and citizenship, backed by coercion and repression,” the statement said.
Ukraine’s foreign ministry had earlier called the voting in occupied regions a “farce” and said it would not recognise the results.
The election brought one surprise. In the Novgorod region, where it was allowed on the ballot for regional elections held at the same time, Yabloko won just over six percent of the vote, enough to enter the regional parliament.
Putin’s political opponents are in exile, in prison or dead. His main rival, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison in 2024.
Additional sources • AFP