Russia’s new parliament will include 49 deputies who have taken part in the war against Ukraine, officials have said after a landslide victory by the ruling United Russia party in widely criticised elections. The pro-Kremlin party won a record 355 seats in the country’s 450-seat Duma lower house of parliament, according to preliminary figures. The result further consolidates Vladimir Putin’s grip on power and gives United Russia a super-majority bigger than its previous 2016 record of 343 seats.
The polls are the first to be held since Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion. United Russia’s general secretary, Vladimir Yakushev, said 86 veterans from Moscow’s “special military operation” were likely to have been elected. He later revised the number to 49.
Putin’s press spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the vote showed that Russians supported their longtime leader, who has ruled as prime minister or president since 2000. Western governments denounced the polls held in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine as a “sham”. Russia’s supreme court last month banned the only party that opposes the war, Yabloko, from participating, leaving liberal voters with no option to express discontent.
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, called the election “another major setback for Russian democracy”. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has suggested the Kremlin wants to recruit another 300,000 troops. In recent months, Russia has escalated its bombardment, pummelling Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with jet-powered attack drones.
Ukraine has launched its own deep strikes, hitting Moscow’s oil refinery on Sunday, as part of what Zelenskyy has dubbed “long-range sanctions”. Russia’s has also intensified its campaign to seize a string of cities in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, including Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. So far, it has been unable to break through, with Ukrainian commanders reporting their own counteroffensive near the city of Lyman.
Inside Russia, criticism of the conflict is banned. Anti-war bloggers have been arrested and jailed. A local politician, Boris Nadezhdin, who previously tried to stand in presidential elections on a peace ticket, was barred from September’s elections and accused of being a “foreign agent”.
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