The official turnout, according to Russia’s Central Election Commission, was reported to be just 59.3 percent of registered voters, a figure the state touted as evidence of robust civic participation.
Elections in Vladimir Putin’s Russia are theatrical events, dressed in enough procedural trappings to allow the state to call them democratic. The outcome, of course, is always known before a single ballot is cast. Last week’s parliamentary election, in which Putin’s party, United Russia, won a record 355 of the 450 Duma seats, is the latest and perhaps starkest performance of that theatre yet.
The numbers alone tell a story of manufactured consensus. United Russia’s supermajority eclipses its previous high-water mark of 343 seats, achieved in 2016, arriving at a moment when the party’s actual popularity should, by any honest reckoning, be under greater strain than ever. Russia is in the fifth year of a grinding war that has cost enormous numbers of lives, invited sweeping international sanctions and reoriented the entire structure of the Russian economy towards military production. A genuinely competitive election in a country facing those pressures would be expected to produce at least some erosion of support for the ruling party. Instead, the Kremlin’s political machine delivered an even more lopsided result than in peacetime. That inversion of the ordinary logic of democratic accountability is itself the story.
The Kremlin has been explicit about what it wants this election to mean. Officials have framed the vote as a referendum on the war or, in the state’s preferred euphemism, the “special military operation”. But a referendum requires an actual choice between positions, and the most basic precondition for that choice was removed before voting began. Russia’s Supreme Court banned the federal candidate list of Yabloko, the only registered party with an anti-war platform, from participating at all. There was, in other words, no box on the ballot to tick for the millions of Russians who opposed the war. A “referendum” that excludes the position it claims to be testing is not a referendum; it is a plebiscite on a predetermined answer, dressed up in the language of consultation.
This is the essential trick of the exercise. The official turnout, according to Russia’s Central Election Commission, was reported to be just 59.3 percent of registered voters, a figure the state touted as evidence of robust civic participation. But turnout numbers mean little when the menu of choices has been curated in advance. Voting in an election with no genuine opposition is not the same civic act as voting in one where outcomes are actually contested. The Kremlin understands this distinction perfectly well, which is precisely why it has spent years hollowing out Russia’s party system, jailing or exiling opposition figures and using the courts as an instrument of electoral engineering rather than a check on it.
Perhaps the most legally and morally fraught dimension of this election is geographic. For the first time, voting was extended to four partly occupied Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — which Russia claims to have annexed but does not fully control, alongside Crimea, annexed in 2014. No government beyond Moscow and a handful of allied states recognises Russian sovereignty over these territories. Ukraine considers them under occupation; the United Nations General Assembly has repeatedly affirmed their status as Ukrainian sovereign territory.
Holding a parliamentary election in contested, wartorn land under military occupation is not a neutral administrative act. It is a political statement, one designed to manufacture facts on the ground. It is designed to make annexation feel routine, procedural, almost boring, by wrapping it in the ordinary bureaucratic language of ballots and voter rolls. It also invites the world to treat as settled what remains, under international law, a live and violent dispute. Reporting on this vote without naming that dynamic would be to launder an act of wartime conquest into a footnote of electoral administration.
It also raises an uncomfortable question about what “voting” even means in this context. Who counted these ballots, and under what conditions? What did it mean to be a voter in a city still recovering from shelling, still under military administration, with independent media absent and alternative political expression foreclosed? These are not the conditions in which free choice is exercised. They are the conditions in which choice is performed for an external audience.
It’s also worth asking what a 355-seat supermajority is actually for, in practical terms. The Duma has functioned for years less as a deliberative body and more as a ratification chamber, rubber-stamping legislation drafted in the Kremlin with minimal debate. An even larger majority does not meaningfully expand United Russia’s power to pass laws, as it was already unconstrained. What it does is signal something to two different audiences.
To the Russian public, it signals inevitability: resistance is futile, opposition is fringe and the war enjoys overwhelming backing. To the outside world, and to Putin’s own inner circle, it signals control: proof that despite battlefield losses, sanctions and years of attrition, the domestic political architecture remains entirely intact. In an authoritarian system, elections like this are not contests for power; they are demonstrations of the state’s capacity to produce whatever outcome it wants, on schedule and with minimal friction. The result is less a measurement of public opinion than a display of administrative competence in manufacturing consent.
So, what does all this mean going forward? The implications extend beyond Russia’s borders. A Duma reconstituted with an even larger pro-Kremlin supermajority, including seats illegally drawn from occupied Ukrainian territory, gives Putin a domestic political instrument fully aligned behind the continuation of the war. There is no legislative body left, even in theory, which could serve as a brake on escalation or a forum for dissenting voices to be heard. Any hope that economic strain or battlefield setbacks might translate into visible political pressure inside Russia’s formal institutions has been further foreclosed.
For the international community, the election poses a familiar dilemma: how to respond to a process that meets the absolute minimal external form of an election while gutting its substance. Condemning it changes little in the short term, given that Moscow has already absorbed years of similar criticism without altering course. But declining to name the vote clearly as a sham, as an exercise conducted partly on occupied territory, as one that excluded the only antiwar option on offer, would represent a quiet capitulation to the very theatre the Kremlin is staging. Precision in describing what happened is not a diplomatic nicety; it is a form of resistance to the normalisation the Kremlin is seeking.
The tragedy of this election is not that it was close and Putin’s side won anyway. It is that it was never close, could never have been close, because every mechanism by which closeness might be measured, such as competitive candidates, free media, an actual opposition party or uncontested territory, had already been dismantled well before voters, willingly or otherwise, went to the polls. What Russia held last week was not a referendum on the war. It was a referendum on the Kremlin’s ability to make dissent disappear. And by that measure alone, it was a resounding success.
*John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.
