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Russians are casting their ballots on Sunday in the final day of voting in parliamentary elections, with the pro-Putin United Russia party widely expected to emerge victorious.
United Russia has won every parliamentary election in the country since 2003.
The 2026 vote marks the first since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, meaning it could offer a slight hint at public sentiment towards the conflict, which has been increasingly impacting Russians at home.
However, in August, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the only party opposing the war – the Yabloko party – to be struck from the ballot. Its candidates are reportedly still able to run for individual seats in some districts.
In a statement at the time, Yabloko cofounder Grigory Yavlinsky hit out at the decision and said they would appeal.
“Barring Yabloko from the elections means refusing to engage in dialogue with people who ask questions that are uncomfortable for the authorities,” he said. “We stand for a ceasefire, diplomacy and peace, for the prevention of nuclear war”.
On Saturday, the party reported that one of its election observers had “lost consciousness” while being “subjected to force” by police in St. Petersburg. It also complained that party observers were being “denied access to polling stations” and that their movement was being “restricted.”
Russia reports cyberattacks
Ella Pamfilova, the chair of Russia’s Central Election Commission, said on Sunday that Russia had recorded more than 1,000 waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) on election infrastructure over the last few days, per the Interfax news agency.
“The level of impact is assessed as very high,” she said, adding that the attacks appeared to have been “carried out by highly professional, well-coordinated groups using artificial intelligence tools.”
A DDoS attack involves hackers attempting to disrupt a targeted network, server, or service by attempting to overwhelm the system with a large volume of traffic.
Moscow hit by ‘largest-scale attack’
The vote comes as the Russian capital was hit by what its governor described as the “largest-scale attack” on the city since the war in Ukraine began.
Sergey Sobyanin reported that Russian air defences had shot down more than 1,600 drones across the country since Saturday, 450 of which he said had been heading towards the capital.
“Several drones reached the territory of the Moscow refinery, and one struck a residential building. There were no fatalities,” he wrote. Moscow Oblast governor Andrey Vorobyov said two people had been killed in attacks across the wider region.
Sobyanin also accused Ukraine of attempting to “disrupt” Russia’s elections – which will determine the makeup of the 450-seat state Duma – with the attacks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed that Ukraine had targeted the Moscow region overnight, saying a “key” oil industry facility as well as a logistics facility were hit.
“Our long-range responses had a very significant impact in the Moscow region last night,” he wrote in a post on X, adding that Russia had launched over 2,000 attack drones, 1,700 aerial bombs and 19 missiles against Ukraine this week.