Russians begin a three-day Duma vote with Yabloko barred and the war on the ballot

Voting for Russia’s ninth State Duma opened on 18 September in Kamchatka and Chukotka and will run through 20 September. All 450 seats are in play: 225 on federal party lists and 225 in single-member districts. It is the first parliamentary election since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Residents of the occupied Ukrainian regions that Moscow calls the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are on the roll for the first time, under martial law.

Ten parties appear on the federal ballot. All of them back the war. More than 70 percent of sitting deputies are seeking another term. More than 4,300 candidates were nominated. Dozens of them are veterans of the Ukraine campaign. United Russia is expected to keep control of the chamber. Analyst Andrei Pertsev has said the Kremlin’s working target is about 300 of the 450 seats.

President Vladimir Putin voted by remote electronic ballot. He has framed the election as a measure of support for the war and for what he calls Russian sovereignty. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said two million people in the capital alone had already used the electronic system by Friday evening. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other senior officials also voted on the first day.

The party that is not on the list

Yabloko, the only party that had campaigned for a ceasefire, is absent from the federal list. The Central Election Commission first registered the slate, then the Supreme Court disqualified the party. Courts also struck Yabloko candidates from some single-member races. Party leader Nikolai Rybakov said on Friday that observers were being blocked at polling stations in Moscow, St Petersburg and other cities. He said about 1,000 Yabloko observers were deployed across 20 regions and asked election commission chair Ella Pamfilova to intervene.

Meduza, citing people close to the Kremlin, reported earlier that the authorities had allowed an anti-war party onto the field as a test and then shut it down when the polling moved. Whether or not that account is complete, the legal outcome is not in dispute. The one party that wanted the war on the ballot as a choice is not on the federal ballot.

The commission is using a system it calls Sashenka, an AI assistant, to handle voter calls around the clock. Pamfilova presented it as a service upgrade. In an election where the opposition party has been removed and observers report being turned away, an official chatbot is not the fact that decides whether the count is trusted.

What a three-day war election is for

Three-day voting, electronic ballots and polling in occupied territory all enlarge the state’s control over who stands, who watches and who is counted. They also let the Kremlin treat turnout and the United Russia share as a political weather report on a war that has now lasted more than four years and that has brought Ukrainian strikes onto Russian oil infrastructure in the weeks before the vote.

Partial results are due after the last stations close in Kaliningrad at 8 p.m. Sunday, 1800 GMT. Near-complete figures should follow on Monday. None of those numbers will restore Yabloko to the list. They will show how a parliament is built when the war is official policy and the ceasefire party has been ruled off the paper.

United Russia war correspondent Evgeny Poddubny, a Hero of Russia and leader of the party’s federal list, voted on Friday. So did Sardana Avksentieva of New People, who cast her ballot in Petrozavodsk. The pictures from those rooms are the campaign the state wants. The missing pictures are the Yabloko list and the observers Rybakov says never got through the door.