Russia extends wartime election into occupied Ukraine, drawing condemnation from Kyiv and Brussels

Russia is holding three days of parliamentary elections that for the first time extend into occupied Ukrainian territory, a move Kyiv and Brussels say has no legal basis and will never be recognized, even as Moscow moves toward an all-but-certain victory for the ruling party.

Voting for all 450 seats of the State Duma runs from Sept. 18 through Sunday, Sept. 20. As of 2 p.m. Moscow time Saturday, nationwide turnout stood at 32.58%, according to Russia's Central Election Commission, reported by the state wire service TASS. Final seat allocations are not expected until after polls close Sunday.

What happened

For the first time, Russia's Central Election Commission established 11 single-mandate electoral districts covering residents of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — Ukrainian regions Russia illegally annexed in September 2022 but has never fully controlled militarily — along with Crimea and Sevastopol, annexed in 2014. Russian authorities say more than 3.5 million people in those areas are eligible to vote; "early" voting there and in Russian border regions reportedly began in late August, weeks ahead of the nationwide vote. President Vladimir Putin, addressing the country Wednesday, said residents of the "new regions" would be voting for the Duma "for the first time since their reunification with Russia," adding: "Your choice and resolve will once again demonstrate that millions of people stand behind our fighters."

The numbers

United Russia currently holds 310 of the Duma's 450 seats and needs 300 to preserve its constitutional supermajority; it is projected to keep that dominance despite polling at some of its lowest approval levels since the 2022 invasion. Yabloko, the only party campaigning on an explicitly pro-peace platform, was barred from the party-list ballot by Russia's Supreme Court in August, leaving it with only scattered single-district candidates. Russia again did not invite election observers from the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, which said in a statement that the decision continues a pattern of violating commitments Russia made under the 1990 Copenhagen Document. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova dismissed the criticism, describing ODIHR as "notorious for double standards" and saying Russia had invited monitors from elsewhere instead, without naming a comparable independent international body among them.

How we got here

This is the first Duma election since Russia's 2022 annexation claims and comes in the war's fifth year. The chamber being contested has 225 seats allocated by national party list and 225 by single-member district, with 11 of those single-member districts now drawn inside occupied Ukrainian territory for the first time — a structural change that gives Moscow's chosen candidates a guaranteed presence in the next Duma regardless of how the broader national vote breaks. Ukrainian human-rights monitors say local election officials in occupied areas have been going house to house accompanied by Russian troops and security personnel, with reports that Moscow-appointed authorities have threatened public-sector workers with dismissal and tied pension payments to participation. "For instance, if a person with a disability or a pensioner relies on social assistance and does not take part in the 'voting,' they could be added to a list of individuals deemed 'disloyal,'" said Violeta Artemchuk, coordinator of the Ukrainian rights group Donbas SOS, in comments carried by the Associated Press and published by Oregon Public Broadcasting.

"Elections held at gunpoint are a farce," said Volodymyr Fesenko, a political analyst at Kyiv's Penta Center.

Reaction, and what happens next

Ukraine's Central Election Commission issued a formal statement calling the vote in occupied territory illegitimate and its results legally void, urging residents under occupation not to take part. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry separately rejected the vote as creating no legal basis for extending Russian jurisdiction over Ukrainian land, citing the 2022 United Nations General Assembly resolution, backed by 143 states, that affirmed the occupation's illegality. In Brussels, European External Action Service spokesperson Christian Wigand said the conduct of the election "underscores the continued and deepening erosion of democracy in Russia," and on the occupied territories specifically said the EU "does not, and will never recognise either the holding of these, so-called elections, sham elections, in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine or their results." Nine Ukrainian human-rights organizations issued a joint call urging a boycott, arguing the vote is "an attempt to use the electoral process to legitimize the Russian occupation."

Inside Russia, opposition to the vote has been harder to organize than in past cycles. Independent Russian outlets have documented scattered protest voting — spoiled ballots, write-in candidates and localized turnout boycotts — even as the Kremlin's control over the ballot and the media environment around it leaves little room for a genuine opposition challenge to United Russia's dominance. Domestic monitors expect the party to fall short of its 2021 vote share even as it holds onto its supermajority, a result some Russian political analysts read as evidence of quiet public fatigue with the war rather than any real electoral threat to the ruling party.

Full results are expected once polls close Sunday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has separately warned, in an August interview, that he expects Moscow to order a new mobilization wave of 300,000 to 500,000 people once the election concludes, deliberately concentrated in Russia's regions rather than Moscow and St. Petersburg to limit domestic political backlash — a claim from Kyiv that has not been independently confirmed by Russian authorities, according to reporting from the Associated Press and separately reported by the Kyiv Independent. If it materializes, it would mark the largest call-up since the war's early mobilization drives in 2022.