By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
Polls opened Friday across Russia's eleven time zones for a State Duma election whose result is not seriously in doubt. Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, which has controlled parliament for 23 years, is expected to extend that grip through a three-day vote that runs to Sunday, when results are due.
What competition exists is nominal. A handful of opposition parties are on the ballot, but according to The Guardian, they reliably vote with the Kremlin on matters that count. A liberal, anti-war party was barred from running at all — a decision that, more than any campaign poster, tells you how this election was shaped before a single vote was cast.
The vote comes against the backdrop of a war in Ukraine now well into its fourth year, a conflict that has hardened Putin's control over Russian political life rather than loosened it. There is no meaningful public debate on the ballot about ending the war, because there is no party positioned to make that argument.
Separately, research detailed by The Guardian describes how tens of millions of Russians have in the past 18 months been pushed onto a state-promoted messaging and payments app called Max, pitched as a patriotic alternative to Telegram and WhatsApp. Researchers say the platform functions as a backdoor onto users' devices — a surveillance tool riding alongside the political machinery that keeps this weekend's election a formality rather than a contest.
What happens Sunday when the polls close is not really the story. The story is what doesn't happen: no opposition breakthrough, no surprise, no real choice on the ballot. That, more than the final tally, is the measure of where Russian politics stands four years into the war.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE —
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."