United Russia takes 355 of 450 seats in a vote with no anti-war party on the ballot
United Russia, the party aligned with President Vladimir Putin, has swept Russia’s parliamentary elections, capturing 355 of the 450 seats in the State Duma. Preliminary results released by the Central Election Commission show the party at 57.83% of the vote after more than 95% of ballots were counted. On paper, it is a commanding mandate. The deeper question is whether voters had any real choice on the war in Ukraine.
First national vote since the full-scale invasion
This was the first nationwide legislative election held since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. For voters opposed to the war, the national ballot offered no party able to defend that position openly. The result is a parliament shaped by a contest in which the central dividing line in Russian politics was effectively kept off the field.
Yabloko’s removal left the ballot without an anti-war force
The most telling case is Yabloko, the liberal party that had been the last Russian political force with an explicitly anti-war stance. It campaigned on a platform called “For Peace and Freedom.”
On August 10, Russia’s Supreme Court annulled the registration of Yabloko’s federal list for the Duma elections. The ruling followed a challenge brought by the Rodina party. The court cited donations received by individuals who had themselves benefited from foreign funds, social media publications, and copyright issues in certain campaign materials.
Yabloko disputes those grounds and says its exclusion was really about its pacifist platform. That is the party’s position, not a judicially established fact. The Russian judiciary upheld the removal of the federal list. Yabloko’s subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court failed, and the party ultimately turned to the Constitutional Court.
The political consequence is significant: the only national party openly opposed to the war that still had access to the electoral process was gone from the federal ballot.
An opposition already hollowed out over years
The exclusion did not happen in isolation. For years, Russian authorities have steadily narrowed the space available to parties and figures challenging presidential power.
Even before the 2026 election, organizations linked to Alexei Navalny had been labeled “extremist,” while several opposition figures were jailed, pushed into exile, or barred from running. In the previous 2021 legislative elections, authorities used legal provisions to keep some Navalny-linked activists off the ballot.
This is not a straightforward contest between parties with competing programs. Voters still had multiple ballots and several parties took part, but the main forces on offer did not present a comparable challenge to the Kremlin on the fundamental question of the war.
The Communist Party, LDPR, A Just Russia, and New People were among the main formations allowed to compete. But no anti-war party was permitted to take part in the federal race.
No OSCE observers on the ground
Another factor weighing on the vote’s international credibility: Russia did not invite the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to deploy an election observation mission.
The OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights condemned the decision in August. According to the organization, Moscow did not respond substantively to its efforts to arrange an assessment mission. The OSCE also noted that restrictions imposed since previous elections have further reduced opportunities for independent scrutiny of the electoral process.
The organization pointed to restrictions on candidates designated as “foreign agents,” campaign financing, the ability of parties to appoint representatives at polling stations, and the conditions under which citizen observers can work.
The OSCE also noted that the independent election monitoring movement Golos was dissolved after years of pressure from Russian authorities. The absence of independent oversight does not by itself prove that every result was falsified. It does, however, deprive voters and foreign observers of an independent mechanism for assessing the process as a whole.
A two-thirds majority that extends beyond election day
With 355 seats, the ruling party retains a two-thirds majority in the Duma. That gives it considerable capacity to back Kremlin priorities and pass legislation requiring a reinforced majority.
Still, a simple conclusion would be misleading: the result does not automatically mean that 57.83% of all Russians approve of the war in Ukraine or of Putin’s policies as a whole. An election result reflects votes cast within a given institutional framework. In this case, the range of choices was itself heavily constrained.
That distinction sits at the heart of the debate over Russia’s 2026 vote. The question is not only how many votes United Russia won, but which voices and which political alternatives were allowed to run.
A win inside a locked political landscape
United Russia’s dominance in the announced results is not in doubt. But analyzing the vote cannot stop at the seat count.
Yabloko’s exclusion, the restrictions placed on opposition candidates and organizations, the absence of OSCE observers, and the broader context of political repression all matter for understanding this election.
The Duma emerging from the ballot box will be overwhelmingly dominated by Putin’s party. But the assembly’s composition must be read against a contest in which open opposition to the war had no real national space to present its program to voters.
Under those conditions, United Russia’s 355 seats are a major electoral fact. They do not, on their own, measure the support of Russian society as a whole for the war in Ukraine. Above all, they show the Kremlin’s capacity to preserve parliamentary dominance in a political system where the conditions for its opponents to compete have become extremely restrictive.
