United Russia, the party that underpins Vladimir Putin, took 57.86% of the vote in the election for the Duma (the lower house of Russia's parliament), according to the count released on Monday with 90.43% of ballots tallied. It was the first parliamentary election held since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the three-day vote ended on Sunday under the largest Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow since the war began.
The result
Behind United Russia came the Communist Party with 13.84%, the nationalist LDPR with 8.9%, New People with 7.94% and A Just Russia with 4.95% — the last of those sitting right on Russia's 5% threshold for the allocation of party-list seats.
Turnout came in just under 57%, and more than 3.6 million voters cast their ballots online. All 450 Duma seats were at stake: half are distributed through party lists, and United Russia is set to take 225 deputies by that route, on top of whatever it wins in single-member districts. That should preserve its two-thirds majority, Euronews reported — the margin that allows constitutional amendments to pass without negotiating with the opposition.
Who was not on the ballot
Weeks before the vote, Russia's Supreme Court barred Yabloko, the one anti-war party, and no party opposing the invasion made it onto the ballot. Yabloko leader Nikolai Rybakov deliberately spoiled his own vote. Two senior figures in the party were handed lengthy prison sentences before the election over remarks about the war.
Voting also took place in the Ukrainian territories Russia claims to have annexed. Ukraine called the election illegal, and Moscow accused Kyiv of attempted sabotage.
A thousand waves of cyberattacks
The chair of the Central Electoral Commission, Ella Pamfilova, reported "more than a thousand waves of DDoS attacks" against the voting infrastructure, which she attributed to "highly professional, well-coordinated groups using artificial intelligence tools". Pamfilova named no culprits. According to Euronews, saboteurs also cut communication lines in Russia's far east.
The attack on Moscow
On Sunday, the final day of voting, Ukraine launched around 1,600 drones at Russia, 450 of them over the capital — the largest attack on Moscow since February 2022. An oil refinery caught fire. Al Jazeera counted three deaths in the Moscow region, two in Russian-held Kherson, including an election official, and one in the Bryansk region on Monday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that "our long-range responses had a very significant impact in the Moscow region last night". Russia's Ministry of Defence pledged to "continue and intensify high-accuracy strikes against military targets in Kyiv".
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said the attack was intended to disrupt the election.
One reading of the number
The think tank NEST argues that part of the vote for the Communist Party and New People may work as a "silent protest" at a moment of economic strain, as "the consequences of the war are increasingly being felt". That is an analysts' hypothesis, not a finding of the count: neither party's public line breaks with the Kremlin's position on the war.
With information from Al Jazeera, Euronews and Meduza.
