Russia opens a three-day Duma vote with Yabloko struck from the party list

Russia began a three-day vote on Friday for every seat in the State Duma, the first parliamentary election since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Polls stay open through 20 September. All 450 seats are in play. Half are filled from party lists that must clear a 5 percent threshold. The other 225 are first-past-the-post races in single-member districts drawn under a map adopted on 23 May 2026.

The map added seats in the Donetsk and Luhansk territories and in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, as well as in Moscow, Moscow Oblast and Krasnodar Krai. It cut seats in Altai Krai, Volgograd and Voronezh. The Central Election Commission received 27.4 billion rubles for the contest, more than 23.3 billion of that for organisation. Electronic voting is running in 33 regions that together hold about 48 million voters. The official slogan is "Your vote is the strength of Russia."

The party that made the ballot a test of anti-war sentiment is not on the federal list. Yabloko, led by Nikolai Rybakov, campaigned under the line "For Peace and Freedom." The Central Election Commission registered its list of 275 candidates on 29 July. On 10 August the Supreme Court, acting on a suit filed by the Rodina party, struck the list off. Presiding judge Vyacheslav Kirillov had earlier handled the 2021 ban on Memorial International. An appeal failed on 17 August. The commission then removed Yabloko from printed ballots but left the numbering of the remaining parties unchanged, so United Russia stayed in first place and LDPR jumped to third.

Twenty-nine Yabloko candidates were later disqualified from district races. Four of them headed regional branches. Iya Boronina, who leads the Udmurtia branch, lost her place after a campaign video used George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone." By Thursday the party said 106 candidates were still standing in 45 regions, down from 135 at the start of the campaign. Deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg was sentenced in Pskov on 17 August to 11 years and one month in a penal colony on charges of repeatedly discrediting the armed forces, spreading false information about the war, and breaking the foreign-agent law.

State pollster VTsIOM had, before the campaign opened, put Yabloko's potential support near 18 percent. El País later reported that the party briefly sat second in official surveys after registration. Meduza, citing people close to the Kremlin, wrote that the authorities first allowed an anti-war list as a test and then shut it down when interest rose. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told The Washington Post he would not call Yabloko a party, only "a cell."

United Russia goes into the vote with Dmitry Medvedev as party leader and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov heading the federal list, joined by Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin, war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny and children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova. The party held 324 seats after 2021 and about 310 going into this week. The Communist Party under Gennady Zyuganov held 56. Leonid Slutsky's LDPR held 22. Sergey Mironov's A Just Russia held 27. Alexey Nechayev's New People held 15. Incumbent Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin remains the face of the chamber.

Exiled opposition figures split over tactics. Yulia Navalnaya and Maxim Katz urged voters to back any party other than United Russia on the list ballot and issued a joint slate for some districts. Rybakov told supporters to spoil the party-list ballot and vote only for remaining Yabloko district candidates. The argument is practical. List seats go only to parties above 5 percent. With Yabloko gone from that column, a protest list vote has no legal home.

Eleven Yabloko members have faced criminal cases since the last Duma vote. Twelve sit on the foreign-agent register. Six party members have been killed over the organisation's 33-year history, Rybakov told El País in early September. He said the aim was not a Duma faction but a visible count of people who want a ceasefire.

The election also covers regional assemblies. St. Petersburg's commission earlier refused to register Yabloko for the city legislature. Voting will take place under wartime restrictions, with Ukrainian strikes on oil infrastructure continuing during the three days. Results are due after polls close on Sunday. The legal majority in the new Duma is 226 seats. United Russia does not need a competitive list opponent to keep it.