Putin’s party dominates in Russia’s sham elections
President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party secured a majority in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house, following the country’s first parliamentary elections since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
In a widely expected result, the ruling party won around 58% of the vote for the 225 deputies elected via party lists, according to preliminary data from Russia’s Central Election Committee. Another 225 will be elected in single-mandate seats, where United Russia candidates are also dominating. Voting took place over the course of three days, with polls closing Sunday evening.
The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said the elections “marked another major setback for Russian democracy” and their outcome “was never in doubt.”
“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.”
