Russia’s Election Was Engineered to Send a Message: Putin Remains in Control

Russia’s Election Was Engineered to Send a Message: Putin Remains in Control - The New York Times

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An Election Engineered to Send a Message That Putin’s Grip Remains Firm

A parliamentary vote demonstrated that President Vladimir V. Putin’s autocratic system was still able to deliver the results he wanted, analysts said.

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!A person wearing a dark suit and holding a briefcase walks on a paved street. City buildings and vehicles are visible in the background.

*The headquarters of the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, the State Duma, the Monday morning after Russia’s parliamentary election in Moscow.Credit...Anastasia Barashkova/Reuters*

By Paul Sonne

Reporting from Berlin

Sept. 21, 2026, 2:09 p.m. ET

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As near-final results came in on Monday for Russia’s first parliamentary elections since President Vladimir V. Putin invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin largely let the numbers do the talking. United Russia, the ruling party, was on track to win more seats than ever. Turnout, according to preliminary statistics, was the highest for a parliamentary vote in 15 years.

The elections were engineered in various ways to achieve the desired results, according to analysts, who cautioned that the numbers shouldn’t be read as an expression of how the Russian public feels. But they can be viewed for the message that the Kremlin was trying to send: Russia is rallying around Mr. Putin, who remains firmly in control despite the war’s challenges.

“The turnout categorically shows that the country supports the commander in chief, the country supports its army at war, and the country believes that we are acting justly, and that right is on our side,” Yevgeny Poddubny, a war correspondent for state television who ran as a United Russia candidate, said during a talk show on Sunday after voting had concluded.

It was a message designed for both domestic and international consumption, as the election authorities said United Russia had won as many as 355 of the 450 seats in the State Duma and claimed about 58 percent of the vote. That was higher than even state-run pollsters had projected.

Dmitri Kulikov, a pro-Kremlin commentator on state television, cheered the election result as a contribution to coming victory in the war. He called it a message to Western countries that he said were trying to destroy Russia by arming Ukraine.

“You know how they love to ‘send a message,’ right?” he said. “Well, we are sending them a very clear message: Don’t hold your breath. Better back off.”

Paul Sonne is the Moscow bureau chief, leading coverage of Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. He is based in Berlin.

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