Putin consolidates grip on Russia as 49 Ukraine war veterans elected to parliament

Russia’s new parliament will include 49 deputies who have taken part in the war against Ukraine, officials said on Monday, after a landslide victory by the ruling United Russia party in widely criticised elections.

The pro-Kremlin party won a record 355 seats in the country’s 450-seat Duma lower house of parliament, according to preliminary figures. The result further consolidates Vladimir Putin’s grip on power and gives United Russia a supermajority bigger than its previous 2016 record of 343 seats.

The polls are the first to be held since Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion. United Russia’s general secretary, Vladimir Yakushev, said 86 veterans from Moscow’s “special military operation” were likely to have been elected. “This is quite a substantial contribution,” he said. He later revised the number to 49.

Putin’s press spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the vote showed that Russians supported their longtime leader, who has ruled as prime minister and president since 2000. “These indicators, of course, point to the highest level of consolidation within Russian society around the head of state,” Peskov said.

Western governments denounced the polls held in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine as a “sham”. Russia’s supreme court last month banned the only party which opposes the war, Yabloko, from participating, leaving liberal voters with no option to express discontent.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, called the election “another major setback for Russian democracy”. “The Kremlin silenced dissent and shut out international election monitors,” Kallas wrote on X, adding: “The veneer of democracy is all that remains.”

The elections come amid speculation that Putin may announce a large mobilisation campaign this autumn, in an attempt to inject fresh momentum to Russia’s bogged down military campaign. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has suggested the Kremlin wants to recruit another 300,000 troops.

In recent months, Russia has escalated its bombardment, pummelling Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with jet-powered attack drones. Ukraine has launched its own deep strikes, hitting Moscow’s oil refinery on Sunday, as part of what Zelenskyy has dubbed “long-range sanctions”.

Russia’s has also stepped up its campaign to seize a string of cities in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, including Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. So far, it has been unable to break through, with Ukrainian commanders reporting their own counteroffensive near the city of Lyman.

Inside Russia, criticism of the conflict is banned. Anti-war bloggers have been arrested and jailed. A local politician, Boris Nadezhdin, who previously tried to stand in presidential elections on a peace ticket, was barred from September’s elections and accused of being a “foreign agent”.

The other parties which won seats in this month’s poll all support the “special military operation”. They include the communists, who came second with 40 seats, the ultra-nationalist LDPR party, with 25, and the New People party, with 20. Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Putin ally, was reelected and said to have won more than 99% of the votes.

Russia’s elections chief, Ella Pamfilova, said United Russia had won a resounding victory with 57.83%, with 95% of ballots counted, up from the 49.8% that it won in the last parliamentary election, in 2021. She praised voters for resisting “psychological pressure”.

Overnight, Russia carried out what Zelenskyy called a “brutal, targeted attack” on the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. He said a nine-story residential building, a university building, a shopping centre, and a boiler house were all damaged, with five people injured. A woman in Kharkiv region was killed in a drone strike.

“Russia is not scaling back its escalatory actions and is signalling a readiness to expand the war. All this is happening against the backdrop of global stability already having been shattered by this war. We must continue to pressure the aggressor to bring this war to an end,” Zelenskyy said.