Russia Opens Wartime Duma Election as 350 Drones Head for Moscow
Russia began three days of voting for its first parliamentary election since the invasion — polls open in occupied Ukraine too — under the largest drone attack Moscow has faced: around 350 launched, sixty-four shot down on approach, by the mayor’s count. Mr Putin accused Kyiv of election interference and of ensuring “there is no peace and no negotiations”; Ukraine’s strikes on refineries and airports continued through the vote’s first day.
The election is theatre with a purpose: a wartime Duma vote — held partly on annexed soil, with real opposition long since imprisoned or exiled — exists to manufacture the appearance of consent for however the war ends, and Mr Putin’s complaint about Ukrainian “interference” in a contest with no permissible outcomes is its own dark comedy. Ukraine’s 350-drone answer is calibrated politics too: forcing Muscovites to vote under air-raid conditions punctures the Kremlin’s core promise that the war stays elsewhere. The result is foreordained; the turnout mechanics — coerced state-sector voting, electronic ballots — are where the regime’s actual anxiety shows. Watch the announced margins in occupied territories — implausible numbers there are being manufactured as annexation’s paper trail.