1. The facts
Voting for the 450-seat State Duma ran from Friday 18 to Sunday 20 September. Polls closed on Sunday evening. With [XX] percent of precinct protocols counted, the Central Election Commission put United Russia at [XX] percent of the party-list vote. In 2021 the party won 49.82 percent and 324 seats, a two-thirds constitutional majority.
Ten parties appeared on the federal ballot. Yabloko was not one of them. Russia's Supreme Court annulled the registration of its federal list in August, the first time since 1993 the party has been absent from a Duma ballot; Yabloko had campaigned under the slogan "For Peace and Freedom" and was the only registered party opposed to the war. The party challenged the ruling at the Constitutional Court and says it still fielded candidates in 99 single-member constituencies. The European Platform for Democratic Elections counts 32 Yabloko members barred from running in 2026 under post-invasion legislation, most over old social media posts featuring Alexei Navalny, whom Russian authorities designate as an extremist. Boris Nadezhdin, barred from the 2024 presidential race, was excluded again and left Russia in August.
2. The context: the ratings behind the result
Russia's state pollsters recorded the president's weakest numbers since the invasion in the months before the vote. According to VTsIOM, the state-run polling centre, Putin's job approval fell from 74 percent in February to 65.6 percent in April, and trust from 78 to 71 percent. In early July VTsIOM logged the fastest single-week fall in his trust rating since 2022; the Kremlin-linked FOM recorded a five-point weekly drop in approval, to 66 percent, the steepest since the partial mobilisation of autumn 2022. Both pollsters attributed the decline in part to mobile-internet restrictions and the blocking of Telegram, then to the fuel shortages caused by Ukrainian strikes on refineries.
Two methodological facts matter for reading those numbers. In spring, VTsIOM stopped publishing its open-ended trust question, in which respondents name a politician unprompted, after Putin's score on it fell to 29.5 percent in April. And from May it added door-to-door interviews to its telephone sample, a change it says explains the subsequent uptick; face-to-face polling in Russia historically yields higher declared support.
3. What to watch
The final CEC figure against 2021. Whether United Russia lands above or below 49.82 percent, and whether it keeps 300 seats, the threshold for changing the constitution alone.
Turnout, and the annexed regions' contribution. The four new regions vote for the first time; their weight in the national result will be scrutinised by observers.
Yabloko's constituency results and its Constitutional Court appeal. The appeal will not change this Duma, but its handling sets the rule for the next cycle.
The pollsters' next release. Whether VTsIOM and FOM resume publishing the suspended indicators after the vote.