Russian parliamentary elections have delivered a comfortable win to the ruling United Russia party, which is closely aligned to President Vladimir Putin. With more than 95 per cent of ballots counted, United Russia has taken 57.83 per cent of the vote, up from the 49.8 per cent which it won in 2021.
The results hand United Russia 355 seats in the 450-seat Duma, which should see it retain its constitutional majority, Russia's Central Election Commission said.
Earlier, the Communist Party was on 14 per cent and the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party on 8.7 per cent. Smaller parties loyal to the Kremlin, including New People and Just Russia, were also on track to win seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.
Former President Dmitry Medvedev said the result showed voters had entrusted United Russia to continue governing.
The vote was the first since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin had framed the vote as a test of support for the war.
No party that opposed the war was permitted to run, with Russia's Supreme Court removing the anti-war Yabloko party from the ballot weeks beforehand.
Voting was overshadowed by a huge Ukrainian drone barrage at the weekend. The strikes killed three people in the Moscow region and two more in the Russian-held part of Ukraine's Kherson region, including an election official.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called it the biggest such attack yet, but said it had failed to disrupt polling.
“This unprecedented attack was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections. The enemy did not succeed,” he said.
Ella Pamfilova, Chair of Russia's Central Election Commission, said the latest attacks had not deterred voters.
“The more pressure they put on us, the more we are seeing an unprecedented level of what I would call public unity,” Russia’s state-owned RIA news agency quoted her as saying.
Russia’s Defence Ministry accused Kyiv of trying to disrupt the “democratic will” of Russian citizens and pledging to intensify strikes.
Election authorities also reported cyberattacks on voting systems over the three-day poll, though they said the process had run smoothly overall.
Ukraine, which has suspended its own elections under martial law, has dismissed the Russian vote as illegitimate.
Vladimir Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov was re-elected to a fifth term as the leader of the Chechnya region with almost all of the vote, Russia's Central Electoral Commission said.
The agency said Kadyrov took 99.85 per cent of the vote in Chechnya, slightly up from 99.73 per cent in 2021. International observers have in the past sharply criticised the conduct of elections in the small mountainous region.
Kadyrov, who rejects such criticism as Western-backed attempts to undermine his rule, regularly stresses his personal loyalty to Putin and has championed a hard line on Ukraine, where he says his Chechen forces have been fighting since 2022.
His rise to power came after his own father, Akhmat, was killed in a 2004 bombing by insurgents.
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Saudi civil defence sent an all-clear on Saturday after issuing alerts for a second time for potential danger in Riyadh and the city of Al-Kharj east of the capital, amid an uptick in attacks by Iran-aligned Houthis on the Gulf country.
The U.S. State Department approved a $2.7 billion military sale to Ukraine for air-defence development upgrades, along with related equipment and services, the department said. Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities reported at least 10 people had died in Russian attacks over the last 24 hours.
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