United Russia leads Duma vote with 57.8% as drone strikes and cyber disruptions hit polling

Vote count and parliamentary majority

United Russia is on course to secure a two-thirds majority in the State Duma elections, the first parliamentary vote held in the country since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. With more than half of the ballots counted, the governing party held 57.8% of the vote. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) followed with 13.7%, while the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) secured 8.7%. The preliminary margin grants United Russia the votes required to pass constitutional amendments without opposition support. Voting took place across Russia and within occupied Ukrainian regions, following the exclusion of anti-war organizations such as the Yabloko party.

Cyber disruptions and voting systems

Russian election infrastructure faced extensive disruptions throughout the three-day voting period. Central Election Commission head Ella Pamfilova reported more than 1,000 DDoS attacks directed at national election infrastructure, alongside 124 attacks targeting remote electronic voting systems. Pamfilova stated that foreign servers were the primary origin point and alleged Ukrainian involvement.

The attacks were conducted by highly professional and well-coordinated groups, using artificial intelligence tools.

In the capital, computer failures affected paper ballot processing across all districts. Dmitry Reut, deputy head of the Moscow City Election Commission, confirmed that technical outages halted the distribution of paper ballots, prompting officials to encourage online voting instead. Turnout reached 52.6% by 15:14 Moscow time on the final day, exceeding the 51.7% turnout recorded in the 2021 parliamentary election.

Drone strikes and security fallout

The final polling day coincided with military strikes inside Russian borders. An aerial attack involving over 1,000 drones caused at least two deaths in the Moscow region, striking an oil refinery in the capital and a bus in occupied Kherson. The Russian Defense Ministry announced an intensification of precision weapon strikes targeting Kyiv in response to the incidents. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed responsibility for the impact of the strikes and noted an upcoming meeting in New York with Donald Trump to address potential de-escalation frameworks.

Observer disputes and midday demonstrations

Independent monitors and Yabloko representatives reported irregularities during voting, including improper ballot storage, issues with home voting, and instances of multiple ballots being cast. In St. Petersburg, police forcibly detained a Yabloko observer, who lost consciousness during the arrest. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) did not deploy observers to monitor the vote.

Russian opposition figures residing abroad, including Yulia Navalnaya and Ilya Yashin, called on citizens to visit polling stations simultaneously at noon on Sunday as a form of silent protest. Queues formed at midday at select locations in Moscow, including the VDNKh exhibition centre, while emigrant demonstrations occurred outside Russian embassies in London and Berlin. Diplomatic disagreements also surfaced with Moldova, whose government rejected a Russian plan to operate 15 polling stations in the breakaway region of Transnistria.