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

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 202...