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.
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.
“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.
Experts believe that the election will allow the Kremlin to continue justifying its war with Ukraine—and it could further consolidate Putin’s power.
“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.”
“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.
“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.”
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.
Trump’s latest comments on the matter came Monday.
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.
How the world reacted to the preliminary election results
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.”
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.
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.”
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