Russia and the Duma the war elected

United Russia took 355 of 450 seats, the party’s largest ever, and 49 war veterans enter the Duma, more than the Communist caucus. The vote debuted in occupied Ukrainian territory and exit polls gave the party 49.4% where the electoral commission announced 57.9%.

Russia’s electoral commission announced on 21 September 2026 what nobody expected otherwise: United Russia took 355 of the 450 seats in the State Duma, the largest tally the party has ever obtained, according to the Central Electoral Commission. With 95.18% of ballots counted, the party held 57.83% of the party-list vote, against 13.81% for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), 8.98% for the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and 7.96% for New People, as recorded by Brasil de Fato. Official turnout reached 59.32%, presented by commission chair Ella Pamfilova as the highest ever in elections of this level — a number the Russian series does not confirm on its own: Kommersant recalled that turnout passed 60% in four earlier elections, the last of them in 2007.

What the commission began publishing afterwards diverged from what state television itself had projected. Exit polls by the state-run VTsIOM institute gave the party 49.4%, and the polling institute INSOMAR (Institute of Social Marketing) gave it 52.8%, according to Bloomberg. The official count finished 8.4 points above the first of them. A technical explanation exists: polling stations in the Far East, where the governing party performs better, enter the system first, and the same counting order appeared in 2016 and in 2021. That year, it was the inclusion of Moscow’s electronic vote that flipped the count in the capital and took from the Communists a victory the paper ballots had given them, as the analysis service bne IntelliNews reported.

The caucus the party itself corrected

The result that changes the composition of the house came from a different count. United Russia’s general secretary, Vladimir Yakushev, announced on 21 September 2026 that the party had elected around 86 veterans of the war in Ukraine. Hours later, the state agency RIA Novosti withdrew the story at the party’s request, and the state agency TASS published the correction: 49. The gap between the two figures is the size of a caucus. The 86 deputies would be almost 19% of the Duma; the 49 are about 11%, and either number exceeds the 40 held by the CPRF, the second-largest force in the house, as G1 reported.

The number the party stands by, 49, makes war participants the largest bloc inside the governing caucus itself. Electoral commissions registered around 200 candidates with participation in the conflict, presented by the Kremlin as the country’s “true elite”, according to the Associated Press (AP).

What was settled before the ballot

The three-day vote was the first for the Duma since the full-scale invasion of February 2022 and the first in which voters could cast a ballot electronically nationwide — in 2021 remote voting existed in 17 regions, according to bne IntelliNews. It was also the first in which Moscow declined the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) invitation to monitor the vote, as the Kyiv Post recorded.

The only registered party that opposed the war was kept off the national ballot. On 10 August 2026, the Supreme Court annulled Yabloko’s federal list on a suit by Rodina, a pro-war party, backed by the Prosecutor General’s Office, according to the Kyiv Post and ukrmedia. Yabloko held no seats in the Duma that ended; what it offered was a legal vehicle for the anti-war vote, and that is what left the ballot. Isolated candidates from the party could still run in single-member districts.

The debut in the occupied territories

For the first time, voting for the Duma also took place in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, alongside Crimea, which took part for the second time, according to Deutsche Welle. Neither Kyiv nor Western governments recognise the vote there.

“The supposed elections to the Duma represented another major regression for Russian democracy. Their result was never in doubt,” said the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, who said the bloc would sanction those who enabled the vote in the occupied territories, as G1 reported.

War as a social base

The last day of voting coincided with the largest Ukrainian air attack on Moscow since the start of the war. The capital’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, spoke of around 1,600 drones, 450 of them aimed at the city, with two people killed on the outskirts and an oil refinery hit. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, commented on the result the following day, saying Ukraine’s long-range response had a very significant impact in the Moscow region, according to Deutsche Welle.

The campaign ran over a country with internet restrictions in several regions, fuel shortages and rising prices, and under the rumour of a new mobilisation wave, denied twice by Vladimir Putin within three days of September, according to the AP. From exile, the opposition tried to turn the election into a measurement: Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Alexei Navalny, called on those against the war to vote at noon on Sunday, 20 September 2026, in an action named “Noon Against the War”. The strategy of backing any party other than United Russia was presented by Maxim Katz and by Navalnaya herself on 14 September 2026, according to the Kyiv Independent. Yabloko advised spoiling the party-list ballot, and clips of young Russians holding apples — yabloko means apple in Russian — circulated online.

What the next Duma inherits

The house that ended passed laws cutting exiled Russians off from banking and consular services, widened the eligibility of people with criminal records to sign contracts with the Defence Ministry, and featured the smallest number of independent candidates in the recent series, according to the Moscow Times. The new one holds two-thirds of the seats in the hands of a single party, which allows the Constitution to be amended without another party’s support.

Final results are expected on 25 September 2026. What the final count does not change is the composition: the Duma that takes office in October 2026 carries the largest governing caucus in recent history and, inside it, the first bloc of veterans with weight of its own — deputies whose mandate and whose biography depend on the continuation of the war that elected them.