Russians began voting on September 18 in a three-day parliamentary election — the first since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine — with all 450 State Duma seats contested alongside 11 gubernatorial and 39 regional legislature races [2][22]. President Vladimir Putin cast his ballot online, shown by state television at his desk [1]. United Russia, its party list led by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, is expected to retain its dominance of the lower house [2].
Putin framed the vote as a demonstration of national unity behind the war effort. "Your choice and your will will once again demonstrate that millions of people stand behind our soldiers, that we are a united people bound together by shared values, historical memory and love for our homeland," he said in a televised address [5][20]. Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin stressed that social and political cohesion is more important than ever, noting that 68.5 percent of laws in the outgoing Duma passed with every faction's support [14]. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said representatives of 55 countries would observe the elections, including partners from the CIS, SCO, BRICS, ASEAN, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America [46], and accused the West of launching a campaign to "torpedo" the elections [29]. Putin said European voters had made clear they do not want war with Russia and accused European leaders of aggravating the conflict by using Ukraine [17].
Analysts and critical outlets described the vote as a rubber-stamp exercise whose result depends on what the Kremlin deems plausible. Political scientist Vladimir Gelman said that "even though these elections are neither free nor fair, they are still the only source of legitimacy" [5]. Political scientist Nina Khrushcheva called the vote a grand staging, saying United Russia's final result depends solely on what the Kremlin considers plausible [14]. Analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said the elections matter to Putin personally and politically because they let him point to having held an election and enjoying significant support [7]. Russian political scientist Alexander Morozov said the Kremlin ran a "special operation" around the campaign by ordering state-controlled media to cut election coverage [13]. Mark Galeotti of Mayak Intelligence said the elections serve as legitimating rituals projecting mass consensus [20].
Opposition figures, election monitors and independent analysts documented a systematic engineering of the vote. The Supreme Court removed Yabloko — the only registered anti-war party — from the party-list ballot in August, after an appeal from the nationalist Motherland party arguing its anti-war stance amounted to seeking violation of Russia's territorial integrity [2][20]; other accounts attribute the removal to a suit by a Kremlin-aligned party over alleged campaign-financing irregularities [6] and to grounds widely ridiculed as pretextual, including AI-generated images, a Soviet-era song and a public-domain photograph of the Hiroshima bombing [8]. Dozens of opposition candidates were barred, including 29 Yabloko nominees — among them Iya Boronina, disqualified after a court ruled her campaign video's use of "Bad to the Bone" violated copyright [9]. At least eight Communist Party candidates were removed, several over old social-media posts referencing Alexei Navalny [9]. Hundreds of observers from Yabloko, the Communist Party and A Just Russia were blocked from polling stations, with Yabloko saying more than 250 of its observers were denied entry [10]. Green party candidate Yulia Kuznetsova disappeared after meeting constituents, and her observers were withdrawn on the basis of a statement sources say was forged [10][38]; she later appeared in a video saying she was fine and would return home soon, which colleagues believe was recorded under pressure [39]. The OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said Russia's failure to invite observers breaches the 1990 Copenhagen Document, marking the third consecutive nationwide Russian vote it cannot observe [34]. A leaked archive of CEC contractor Tsifrotekh showed the new GAS Vybory 2.0 platform allows manual editing of protocols and unverified voter-list uploads [41]. Election analyst Sergey Shpilkin calculated United Russia's real 2021 result at 31-33 percent, with 13.8 million votes in the portion of the count that has no mathematical explanation [6].
Pollsters and sociologists described a population exhausted by the war and squeezed by inflation and fuel shortages. Nearly half of those surveyed by state pollster FOM reported alarm as the prevailing mood, 60 percent told ExtremeScan the war has hurt daily life, and six in ten favoured peace talks, according to Levada Center data [19]. Levada placed real support for United Russia at about 20 percent, while official bodies put it at 35 percent [6]. Sociologist Elena Koneva of ExtremeScan said rising support for Yabloko "is, in fact, a demonstration of people's attitude toward the war" [19]. Residents of the provincial city of Tver described unease over rumours of post-election mobilisation, with pensioners saying their incomes no longer cover medicine, food and firewood [25]. Andrei Klepach, chief economist of the state VEB.RF bank, warned that Russia "won't win the competition in this war of attrition" and that a social crisis was nearly certain; he was dismissed the day after his comments were published [20]. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Putin plans to mobilize 300,000 to 500,000 people after the vote, which Putin has denied [16][7].
Exiled opposition leaders could not agree on a response to a vote they considered unwinnable. Yulia Navalnaya and blogger Maxim Katz urged backing any party except United Russia to reduce the ruling party's result [7][19]. Yabloko chairman Nikolai Rybakov called on voters in districts without a Yabloko candidate to deliberately spoil their ballots, rejecting the exiles' appeals: "You are suggesting that we once again go, like sheep, dancing to their tune, and vote for those who have caused the deaths of people in Russia and Ukraine?" [7][14]. Opposition politician Ilya Yashin called for people to gather at polling stations at noon on September 20 so the queues become a visible expression of discontent [19]. Russia expert Ryhor Nizhnikau called both strategies "a call of despair, where neither side nor any strategy can actually have an impact" [8].
Ukraine's government, human-rights groups and international bodies argued that voting in the occupied Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson is legally void. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry called the elections "a farce" with no legal basis for extending Russian jurisdiction [16]. Oleksandr Slyvchuk of the Transatlantic Dialogue Center argued the vote is "a null act from the outset" because an occupying power cannot convene elections for its own legislature on territory over which it has no sovereignty, citing the Fourth Geneva Convention and a UN General Assembly resolution adopted with 143 votes in favour [21]. The European Commission said the EU "does not, and will never recognize" the elections in occupied territories [36]. Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that polling station addresses, commission members and journalist accreditation in occupied Donetsk go unpublished, video surveillance is absent, and military unit commanders are empowered to form commissions and control media access [31]. Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said "a ballot does not create sovereignty" [42].
The youth wings of the LDPR, Communist Party and A Just Russia courted voters on TikTok with anti-establishment aesthetics while staying within limits that forbid questioning the war. Teenage LDPR blogger Alexander Berkutov criticized United Russia over rising prices and closed shops [23]. Olga Serikova, who runs the Komsomol Moskvy TikTok account for the Communist Party youth wing, said "our task is not to earn a nice prison sentence for taking a nice anti-war position" [23]. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov declared in a video that "we are waging war for peace" [23]. The Communist Party has built its campaign on targeted criticism of the war's consequences, making it attractive to protest voters [27].
Polling stations in Sochi were closed on the first day of voting and election commission members, observers and voters moved to shelters because of a Ukrainian drone threat [30]. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said more than 350 drones bound for the capital were downed overnight [29], though another account of his remarks said dozens were destroyed among more than 350 that flew toward the Moscow region [11]. Central Election Commission head Ella Pamfilova reported turnout of roughly 30 percent including online voting [36]. Official pollster FOM projected United Russia winning 47-49 percent of the party-list vote, followed by the Communist Party at 14-17 percent [8]. The three-day vote concludes on September 20 [2][9].