Putin's Party Took 57.8% in Russia's First Wartime Parliamentary Election With Four-Fifths of the Vote Counted, Up From 49.8% in 2021. The Only Anti-War Party Was Barred, One of Its Observers 'Lost Consciousness' While Being Detained, and Election Officials Say 74 Commission Buildings Were Damaged or Destroyed During the Three Days of Voting.

The United Russia party that backs President Vladimir Putin is cruising to victory in Russia's first parliamentary election since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the Central Election Commission reporting the party at 57.76% of the vote with 82% of ballots counted early Monday. The result was never in doubt. What the Kremlin wanted from three days of voting, which ended Sunday, was a number it could hold up as proof that Russians stand behind the war, and by its own count it got one.

The Communist Party was running second at 13.89%, the nationalist LDPR third at 8.77%, with New People and A Just Russia trailing at roughly 8% and 5% in earlier partial returns. Final results will not be tallied before Sept. 25. In the last parliamentary vote, in 2021, United Russia took 49.82% and 324 of the 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house. Putin is not a member of the party, though he led it from 2008 to 2012, and he was not on the ballot; he won a fifth term in 2024 with roughly 88% of the vote and does not face voters again until 2030. The party's list was headed by former president Dmitry Medvedev.

Meaningful opposition was effectively absent. Yabloko, Russia's only registered anti-war party, was briefly allowed to compete before the Supreme Court barred its federal party list last month. Some individual Yabloko candidates ran in single-seat districts under heavy pressure; two of the party's deputy leaders were recently jailed over their anti-war stances and social media posts. On Saturday the party said one of its election observers "lost consciousness" while being detained at a polling station in St. Petersburg, and that numerous other observers were turned away elsewhere. The independent monitor OVD-Info counts more than 2,000 people currently imprisoned in Russia for political reasons.

The commission put overall turnout at 56.66%, with Moscow reporting record participation. Online voting, introduced in 2021, was pushed hard this time: the city of Moscow offered residents prize points for voting electronically rather than on paper, and some voters told the independent outlet SotaVision they were denied paper ballots because of "malfunctions" and steered to terminals instead. Putin himself voted online, and the Kremlin released video of him navigating the system. Critics have long argued electronic voting is far less transparent than paper.

Commission chair Ella Pamfilova said the system came under a "very large-scale and intense" attack. She reported more than 3,000 waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks on election infrastructure, 135 attacks on the remote electronic voting system, 420 on Rostelecom's networks and nearly 2,000 on electronic government infrastructure. In 10 regions, she said, 74 buildings housing election commissions were damaged or destroyed during the voting days. State news agency TASS reported outages of the Moscow online system from Friday into Saturday.

The war framed everything. Ukraine launched one of the largest drone attacks on Moscow of the entire conflict overnight into Sunday, setting the capital's refinery on fire and killing at least two people, as Russia's own drones and missiles kept hitting Ukrainian cities through the voting period. New Duma constituencies were created for the Moscow-controlled parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and residents there were asked to vote. Ukraine rejected those elections as a "farce."

Ahead of the vote, Putin told the nation in a televised address that the result would show Russians are united behind the army. "Your choice and determination will show once again that millions of people are backing our fighters and that we stand together, united by shared values, our historical memory, love for our Motherland," he said. Outside observers say the more telling figure is not United Russia's share but turnout, the one number the Kremlin cannot fully manufacture and the one it will now cite as a mandate to keep fighting.