Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, is on track to secure a record number of seats in the lower-house State Duma following the country's first parliamentary elections since the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, preliminary results showed Monday.
With 95% of the ballots counted, Central Election Commission (CEC) chief Ella Pamfilova announced that United Russia received 57.83% of the party-list vote while dominating single-member districts, where its candidates were leading in 208 of 225 constituencies.
Pamfilova said United Russia stands to capture around 355 seats in the 450-seat State Duma — surpassing its previous record of 343 seats set in 2016 and comfortably maintaining its constitutional supermajority.
Four other parties cleared the threshold to enter parliament: the Communist Party with 40 seats, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) with 25, New People with 20 and A Just Russia with four.
Turnout reached nearly 60%, the highest for parliamentary elections since 2003, according to the newspaper Kommersant.
Independent analysts described the vote — which President Vladimir Putin framed as a test of public support for the war effort — as the most uncompetitive in modern Russian history.
At least 86 Ukraine war veterans are expected to gain seats in the latest convocation of the State Duma. Putin has touted veterans-turned-politicians as Russia’s “new elite.”
The liberal Yabloko party, the only party running on an anti-war platform, failed to secure any seat in single-member constituencies. In August, Russia’s Supreme Court blocked Yabloko from the party-list ballot, and its candidates running in single-member districts also faced exclusion and pressure from the authorities.
In concurrent regional gubernatorial races, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov was re-elected with an official 99.85% of the vote.
The CEC said final official election results will be released by Friday at the earliest.
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