What Russia’s Parliamentary Election Results Mean for Putin and the War - Time Magazine

Russia's electoral commission on Monday said that United Russia, the ruling party aligned with President Vladimir Putin, is projected to win the parliamentary election that has been widely criticized as a “sham.” The Central Election Commission (CEC) reported that 95% of the votes have been counted after a three-day election that began last Friday and ended Sunday. 

While the final counts are not expected to be certified until later this week, preliminary figures show that the pro-Kremlin party is projected to win a record 355 seats in the country’s 450-seat Duma, the lower house of parliament, giving United Russia an even larger supermajority than its 2016 record high of 343 seats.

Voter turnout was high at just over 59%, according to a briefing from the CEC.

The election is the first parliamentary poll since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the Kremlin has cast it as a referendum on support for what it calls a “special military operation” rather than a war. It was also, therefore, the first parliamentary election to include voters from four partly occupied regions of Ukraine—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—which Moscow claimed to annex illegally in 2022 but does not fully control. Voting also was held in Crimea, which was illegally annexed in 2014.

Despite the vote being framed as an opportunity for citizens to express sentiments about the war, it is widely considered an illusion of choice: Russia’s supreme court last month banned the federal candidate list of the one registered antiwar party, Yabloko, from participating in the State Duma.

“I would be very careful to kind of unpack the distribution of votes as something indicative of what people think of the war,” David Szakonyi, a professor at George Washington University whose research focuses on Putin-era Russia, tells TIME. “They were not given the choice to vote against it.”

“This playing field was tilted before the votes were even counted, and this was not by any means a free and fair election,” he adds. 

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told members of the press Monday that the election showed how Russians support the country’s leader and “point to the highest level of consolidation within Russian society around the head of state.”

Experts believe that the election will allow the Kremlin to continue justifying its war with Ukraine—and it could further consolidate Putin’s power.

United Russia’s supermajority could embolden parliament to pass “drastic legislation” with regard to future war efforts, Szakonyi says. Although United Russia already held a constitutional supermajority in the outgoing Duma, the larger margin could embolden lawmakers to pursue more severe measures.

“They have every resource available to them to change the political system as Putin directs,” Szakonyi says, “and the propaganda in the next week or two is going to heavily emphasize the fact that United Russia improved its performance.”

Parliament could specifically use the election to request more sacrifices from citizens for the war effort, according to Szakonyi. He says, for example, that the party could support legislation expanding military recruitment or defending “greater investment in the war effort, at the expense of healthcare, education, and domestic spending in general.” 

“It is highly possible that they will at least kind of build on these electoral results when they demand more from voters and citizens in the next couple months in order to win the war,” he continues.

Olena Lennon, a practitioner in residence of National Security at the University of New Haven, agrees that Putin did not necessarily need any more legislative power to exact his objectives. Instead, the election was “more about creating an image of national unity and demonstrating to various audiences that Putin has total political control," she says, adding that hosting an election offers the “optics of popular legitimacy, institutional strength, and political stability.”

“That potentially gives Putin greater political cover and legitimacy for unpopular measures in the future—such as putting the economy in wartime production mode and potentially full mobilization," Lennon says.

A new mobilization campaign could inject new momentum into Russia’s offensive campaign and replenish battlefield losses. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last month that he believes Russia is planning ​to draft an additional 300,000 troops for the war effort.

“We are confident that following the elections, they will carry out a mobilization. We believe this will not take place in the major cities,” Zelenskyy said on Aug. 23. “They’ll lose all 300,000 of these newly mobilized Russians there; we’ll wipe them out.”

Putin has denied that a new mobilization campaign is planned, calling the rumors “utter nonsense” on Sept. 1. Two days later, at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin emphasized that there “is no scenario today that would require mobilization.” 

More than four years into the war, Russians are facing rising living costs amid inflation that some economists attribute partly to military spending, with the prices of several food staples in rising this year. The country is also experiencing fuel shortages as Ukraine continues to strategically target its oil refineries and depots.

U.S. President Donald Trump has criticized the tactic in recent weeks, arguing that it is impacting global fuel prices. Energy-market data over the past six months, however, shows that the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and subsequent constrictions of major oil passageways like the Strait of Hormuz is the much larger disruption to global oil and diesel supplies.

Trump’s latest comments on the matter came Monday.

“Russia has unfortunately lost control of its Diesel Oil Industry due to its War with Ukraine. A large number of their Diesel refineries have been blown up and are, at least temporarily, out of commission,” Trump said on Truth Social on Sept. 21. “This ridiculous and never ending War with Ukraine must be ended.”

Beginning Saturday, as Russia entered its last day of voting, the government said it intercepted more than 1,600 Ukrainian drones, including 450 directed toward Moscow. The figures, attributed to Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin and reported by state media TASS, have not been independently verified.

According to a statement by Sobyanin on Telegram, this was the largest ever drone attack on the Russian capital, damaging the city's oil refinery.

European powers have largely condemned the results. That includes France's foreign ministry, which released a statement ​on Monday saying that the vote ⁠did not meet the conditions for “free, pluralistic, democratic elections.”

“Heightened repression against civil society and the opposition, ⁠the exclusion of several political parties, growing ⁠restrictions on freedom of expression and the banning of independent media have undermined the Russian people's ability to freely form ⁠and express their choice,” the statement said.

A joint statement from the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand was also released Monday, calling the vote a “sham”—particularly as it pertained to the four occupied Ukrainian territories.

“Holding Russia’s State Duma elections in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, as Russia did in Crimea and Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, is a gross violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence, and the UN Charter,” the statement said. “We call on the international community to reject Russia’s attempts to normalise its occupation, condemn the holding of sham elections on Ukrainian territory.”

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief and a vice president of the European Commission, called the elections “another major setback for Russian democracy” in a post on X.

“The Kremlin silenced dissent, barred the only registered party that opposed its war in Ukraine, and shut out international election monitors,” she said. “The veneer of democracy is all that remains in Russia.”