Overview
- Voting opened Friday in the Far East and continued nationwide through Sunday in a three-day process to choose all 450 seats in the State Duma.
- The first day saw reports of hundreds of Ukrainian drones shot down across Russia and temporary evacuations at some polling stations, including in Sochi.
- President Vladimir Putin and other senior officials used remote electronic voting, a method that opposition groups and other parties have criticized as vulnerable to manipulation.
- The registered anti-war party Yábloko was removed from the national list by the Supreme Court and several of its leaders received multi-year prison sentences, narrowing on-ballot dissent.
- Independent polls show many Russians favor negotiating to end the fighting, yet analysts and Western officials expect Kremlin-backed United Russia to keep its dominant Duma majority and say the vote lacks full democratic legitimacy.