The most revealing result of Russia’s parliamentary elections will be the one produced by a party that does not appear on the ballot. On September 18, Russia began three days of voting to elect a new State Duma. The winner is already known. What remains unknown is how much pressure and how much electoral fraud the Kremlin will need to reach the figure Vladimir Putin wants, and how quickly that figure will be presented as proof that Russians support prolonging the war.
For twelve days this summer, citizens had a legal nationwide avenue to express the opposite. The Central Electoral Commission registered Yabloko’s list on July 29. Yabloko is an opposition party embedded in the system that has long struggled to survive within the limits set by the Kremlin, but its 2026 campaign stood out for a proposal that no other national slate had been allowed to defend: a ceasefire and peace. On August 10, the Supreme Court excluded the slate from the elections. The appeal was rejected on August 17 and, the following day, the commission formally removed Yabloko’s list from the ballots.
The sequence was more than a routine judicial purge. It became a brief political experiment that the Kremlin ended when the outcome began to be politically dangerous.
Twelve days that exposed fear
The political field had already been cleared in advance. Twelve members of Yabloko faced political prosecutions, eight were in prison and twelve prominent figures had been declared “foreign agents” and barred from running in the elections. The Kremlin seemed to assume that a weakened Yabloko would demonstrate how marginal opposition to the war really was. Instead, the party became a meeting point for those opposed to it.
“Twelve members of Yabloko faced political prosecutions, eight were in prison and twelve prominent figures had been declared ‘foreign agents’.”
Polls by FOM showed that support for Yabloko had risen from 1% on July 19 to 4% on August 9. Favorable opinions about the party had increased from 2% to 7% over six months. The party reported receiving 8,000 membership applications — twice its number of current members — as spontaneous gatherings formed outside the Supreme Court. About ninety people were detained on August 17.
According to EK Stratcom sources with access to internal surveys of the Presidential Administration, these placed Yabloko’s support at around 10% nationwide and up to 20% in Moscow. The subsequent ExtremeScan survey showed how far support for the only national pro-peace candidacy extended.
Preliminary results of an ExtremeScan poll conducted with 800 adults from September 4 to 10 indicated that 18% said they would probably vote for Yabloko if it could run. In the vote-intention estimate for those who had already decided which party to vote for, Yabloko stood at 24.6% and United Russia at 31.8%. The figures reveal an electorate that the official campaign sought to erase from the ballot.
The purge continued after the party list disappeared. In September, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that 34 of Yabloko’s 137 candidates in single-member districts had also been excluded. The Kremlin’s error was not simply allowing Yabloko to appear on the ballot, even briefly. For twelve days, it allowed Russian society to recognize itself.
“The preliminary ExtremeScan results showed that 18% said they would probably vote for Yabloko if they could run”
The demand revealed by that episode goes beyond support for a party. In August, according to the Levada Center, 59% favored peace negotiations and 31% favored continuing military operations. Support for negotiations had fallen from the peak of 67% reached in February, but remained clearly majority. A previous ExtremeScan poll more directly posed the cost of the war: 56% preferred to halt hostilities, while only 21% accepted a new mobilization. As researchers noted, “the cost of war divides parties more than support for it in the abstract.”
Taken together, these polls show that negotiations enjoy majority backing, while a new mobilization does not. The Kremlin’s electoral machinery is suppressing a demand that already exists within Russian society.
How to manufacture a majority
The Kremlin’s objectives have repeatedly shifted. In October 2025, authorities sought turnout of at least 55% and 55% of the votes for United Russia. By March, the turnout target had fallen to 50%. In July, the turnout target for United Russia in regions with medium support had fallen to 45%. Then, in early September, the trend suddenly reversed: 47% in regions with medium support, between 52% and 53% in those with higher mobilization, and more than 50% nationwide.
The turn did not correspond to any comparable rise in support in independent polls. It occurred after Putin personally became involved in the campaign, in his first direct intervention in favor of United Russia since 2007. One of Meduza’s sources summed up the new imperative: “The president has shouldered the load; we work for him.” Once Putin backed the party with his personal authority, those responsible for the elections were no longer allowed to settle for merely plausible figures. They had to present numbers worthy of the president.
“Once Putin backed the party with his personal authority, those responsible for the elections were no longer allowed to settle for merely plausible figures.”
The final forecasts from power-aligned entities place United Russia between 47% and 53%. ExtremeScan’s September poll gave it 35.6% among voters who named a party and 23.9% among the entire sample. The gap between these figures is evident. In that same independent poll, only 30.8% expected the national elections to be clean; 32.7% expected the result to be significantly altered. 49% said the Duma does not have real capacity to disagree with the president on important issues.
Sources at Meduza — including two deputy governors, political consultants who work with regional authorities and a source close to the Presidential Administration — indicated that higher targets would require intensifying the “administrative and labor mobilization” of public employees and workers in state-owned enterprises, along with more direct electoral fraud, euphemistically labeled “correction.” Mid-level managers designated as “mobilizers” or “brigade chiefs” are tasked with ensuring that certain groups of workers go to vote. At the same time, the campaign remains deliberately gray, so that discontented voters have little incentive to go to the polls. The method is simple: mobilize power-dependent voters and discourage voluntary participation.
“The method is simple: mobilize power-dependent voters and discourage voluntary participation”
Our own work in Russia, in a censored information environment, unpacks another part of the official narrative: the assertion that anti-war arguments find no audience. Between February and August, EK Stratcom’s Reset campaign recorded 224.4 million views and 13.9 million reactions across formats. Arguments about peace, prices, censorship, and political accountability continue to break through in Russia.
What Europe must reject
On September 16, Putin presented the vote as a demonstration of unity and support for Russian soldiers. He had already stated that the result should confirm “the resilience of the state, the maturity of the political system and its ability to withstand any external threat, blackmail or aggression.” It is not the usual rhetoric of a campaign. The Kremlin needs an image of cohesion that can be shown both domestically and internationally as political validation for what comes next.
“The Kremlin needs an image of cohesion that can be shown domestically and internationally as political validation for what comes next”
After this vote, the next national cycle will take place in 2030-2031. Public opinion will weigh less in the Kremlin’s calculations, while the manufactured majority can be invoked to justify greater repression, new mobilizations, or an escalation beyond Ukraine. The Kremlin is already preparing the arguments to justify those decisions to the population.
Governments, analysts and European media should never reproduce the percentage announced for United Russia without explaining how the only national peace-friendly list was excluded, how pressures were exerted at work, and to what extent the results differed from independent polls. Interpreting silence under repression as consent is lazy analysis. Presenting a manufactured result as the free expression of Russian society is even worse: it turns the Kremlin’s internal coercion into international legitimacy.
“Presenting a manufactured result as the free expression of Russian society is even worse: it turns the Kremlin’s internal coercion into international legitimacy”
When the vote ends on September 20, the Kremlin will say that Russia has spoken. But peace was eliminated before the country could respond. The question is whether Europe will accept the manufactured figure as proof that peace was never desired.
The Kremlin can manufacture a 50%. Europe should not call that consent.
