Russia's new Duma is not a parliament in any functional sense. United Russia's 355 of 450 seats — surpassing its own 2016 record of 343 — represents a super-majority engineered through the systematic removal of every competing power centre. The remaining seats belong to parties that differ from United Russia only in how loudly they support the war. The communists took 40 seats, the ultra-nationalist LDPR 25, and the New People party 20. Every one backs the invasion. The inclusion of 49 war veterans as deputies is the structural tell. Initially claimed at 86 by United Russia's general secretary Vladimir Yakushev before being revised downward, the veteran cohort serves a dual function: it rewards loyalty from the military class and embeds the war's political economy directly into the legislative body. These are not independent actors. They are stakeholders in the conflict's continuation. The elimination of Yabloko — the only party opposing the war, banned by Russia's supreme court last month — closed the last institutional pressure valve. Boris Nadezhdin, who attempted a presidential run on a peace platform, was barred from the September elections and labelled a "foreign agent." Anti-war bloggers have been arrested and jailed. The cost of dissent is now personal destruction. Election chief Ella Pamfilova reported United Russia winning 57.83% with 95% of ballots counted, up from 49.8% in 2021. Ramzan Kadyrov claimed more than 99% in Chechnya. Western governments denounced voting in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine as a sham. EU diplomat Kaja Kallas called it "another major setback for Russian democracy," noting the Kremlin "silenced dissent and shut out international election monitors." The election lands amid speculation that Putin may announce a large mobilisation campaign this autumn. Ukraine's President Zelenskyy has suggested the Kremlin wants to recruit another 300,000 troops. A parliament stacked with war veterans and stripped of anti-war voices would offer no institutional resistance to such a call. The Duma has become a rubber stamp with military insignia. On the ground, the war grinds forward. Russia has intensified its bombardment of Kyiv and other cities with jet-powered attack drones, while pushing to seize Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in the Donbas. Ukraine has struck back with deep attacks, hitting Moscow's oil refinery on Sunday. Overnight, Russia carried out what Zelenskyy called a "brutal, targeted attack" on Zaporizhzhia, damaging a nine-storey residential building, a university, a shopping centre, and a boiler house. Putin's spokesperson Dmitry Peskov framed the result as proof of national unity: "the highest level of consolidation within Russian society around the head of state." The consolidation is real, but it is the consolidation of a closed system — one that has eliminated every internal mechanism for course correction. Twenty-five years of Putin's rule have produced a state that can escalate but cannot retreat, can mobilise but cannot negotiate, can win elections but cannot hold them.
