Preliminary results from Russia’s parliamentary elections, published on Monday morning, 21 September 2026, showed the ruling United Russia party leading the three-day vote amid cyberattacks and intense Ukrainian drone strikes targeting Moscow and other Russian regions on the final day of voting.
Preliminary results put United Russia in the lead
The party led by former president Dmitry Medvedev and backing President Vladimir Putin won 57.5% of the vote after about 71% had been counted. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation came second with 14%, while the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia ranked third with 8.7%.
According to projections by Russia’s TASS news agency, the result indicates that the ruling party is on course to secure a two-thirds majority in the State Duma, enough to amend the constitution. United Russia had been widely expected to retain its broad control of the lower house of Russia’s parliament. Voting began on Friday and ended on Sunday, with 111 million voters eligible to participate.
The elections, the first since Russia launched its full-scale attack on Ukraine in 2022, were held to renew all 450 seats in the State Duma. The vote included residents of four Ukrainian regions that Moscow declared annexed after the war began, despite not fully controlling them, as well as residents of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Vote includes disputed regions
Kyiv condemned the vote in those regions as illegal, while the European Union described it as a “blatant violation of international law”. The vote took place under tight restrictions and amid the near-total absence of parties opposed to Putin’s policies.
Only parties that supported the Russian president and the war in Ukraine to varying degrees were allowed to participate: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the conservative A Just Russia party and the liberal New People party, alongside the ruling party. Yabloko, considered the only openly anti-war party, was initially allowed to contest the elections before being disqualified by the courts in August.
The European Union also condemned the vote, saying it was held in an atmosphere marked by “systematic and institutional repression”. Putin had urged Russian citizens to participate and presented the vote as an expression of support for the army and “a response to those who want to weaken Russia”. Through the elections, the Kremlin sought to demonstrate popular support for the war and strengthen the legitimacy of its related actions.
European criticism and restrictions on competition
Medvedev, who heads United Russia, said his party appeared to have achieved an “outstanding performance”. He added, in remarks carried by Russia’s RIA news agency: “We must now implement the president’s decisions.” The vote coincided with widespread cyberattacks that Russia’s election commission said targeted the electronic voting system and communications infrastructure.
The commission said it had recorded “more than 1,000” waves of attempts to flood the system with requests, as well as attacks targeting “communications infrastructure across Russia in general”. These attacks are known as distributed denial-of-service attacks and aim to disrupt electronic systems by overwhelming them with a continuous stream of requests.
Election Commission chair Ella Pamfilova said the attacks had been carried out by “highly professional and well-coordinated groups using artificial intelligence tools”, adding that some attempts showed “indications of Ukrainian involvement”. Pamfilova had announced on Saturday that the election systems had come under a “powerful cyberattack”, but said it had not disrupted them.
Drone attacks kill two near Moscow
Voting continued alongside waves of Ukrainian drones targeting the Russian capital and surrounding region. Russian officials said attacks on the final day of the elections killed two people and sparked a fire at an oil refinery.
Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said a 44-year-old woman and an elderly man had been killed at separate locations, while about 400 people were evacuated from a 21-storey building after it was struck by a drone. Russia’s Defence Ministry accused Ukraine of trying to “thwart the democratic expression of the will of Russian citizens” and said Moscow would continue to “intensify its strikes using high-precision weapons against military targets in Kyiv”.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin described the Ukrainian attack as “unprecedented” and said it had been “clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections”. He added that “the enemy did not succeed”, saying Russian air defences had shot down more than 1,600 drones, including 450 that he said had been heading towards Moscow.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Monday that its forces had struck several targets inside Ukraine, including two cargo ships it said were being used for military purposes, a gas distribution station and infrastructure at the port of Izmail, as well as the “BDU Logistic” supply and provisioning centre in the Kyiv region. In contrast, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy praised the strikes targeting Russian territory.
He said that “our long-range operations had a very significant impact in the Moscow region last night”, confirming that about 10 different types of weapons had been used in the operations.
