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Russians are voting in regional and local elections in a scattering of locations across the country, choosing governors or legislators in the first vote to be held since the Ukraine invasion nearly seven months ago.
The balloting on September 11 is not expected to yield major political shifts on either the national or local level, and the war in Ukraine featured only in isolated cases in pre-election campaigns. Rather, local issues such as public transit investments or environmental concerns, or decrepit housing stock, topped the list of campaign issues in many places holding votes.
In all, 15 regions — scattered from the Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad to Buryatia, in southern Siberia — will choose new governors or top executives for their regions. Voters in six regions were also choosing new members of local legislatures.
In Moscow, voters were allowed to cast ballots as early as September 9 to choose members of 125 district councils: local legislative councils that mostly decide on extremely local issues such as new playground equipment, trash removal, or other quality-of-life concerns.
With voting under way, Russia’s Central Election Commission Chairwoman Ella Pamfilova said she had sent a letter to regional election commissions recommending they submit vote tallies no sooner than September 14.
Usually, election results in Russia are announced either immediately after polls close or the next day.
Pamfilova said this extra time would allow her commission to “carefully” consider any filed voter complaints, although she also noted so far only 10 of the 82 regions holding elections had registered any such reports.
People interviewed on the streets of Moscow this week by RFE/RL’s Russian Service had mixed feelings about whether to vote and whether it served any purpose.
“If you personally feel like voting, why not go ahead and participate?” one man, who did not provide his name, said standing out the Universitet subway station. “Personally, I’m not going to bother.”
“There are rules and we live in this system, we work here, so we need to live by the rules of the system,” said another man, who also did not provide his name. “Therefore, if they tell me I should go, I’ll go and vote.”
Since before the Ukraine invasion, the Kremlin has slowly squeezed independent opposition parties and good-governance civil society groups. The result has been a tightly controlled electoral process dominated by United Russia, the Kremlin-linked political party, and roughly three other so-called systemic political parties — the Communists, the Liberal Democratic Party, and A Just Russia. All routinely vote in favor of Kremlin initiatives.
United Russia candidates were expected to win handily in most of the races in the September 11 voting.
The main independent opposition force remains the network set up by Aleksei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader who nearly died after being poisoned with a toxic nerve agent and who is now serving a prison sentence in central Russia on charges widely considered to be politically motivated.
Prior to last September’s national parliamentary vote, Navalny’s group set up a system called Smart Vote, which aimed to undermine United Russia’s chokehold on politics by directing voters to alternatives with the biggest chance of causing an upset.
The group rolled out a Smart Vote program for the September 11 election; however, Leonid Volkov, a leading Navalny deputy who now lives outside of Russia, said it was only targeting Moscow, where voters tend to be more liberal and often more politically engaged.
The reason, he said in an interview with the online newspaper Novaya gazeta, is that many of the would-be candidates endorsed by Smart Vote support the ongoing war in Ukraine.
“Any action aimed at weakening the Putin system is correct and is the duty of a citizen,” Navalny’s supporters said in a statement on his YouTube channel. “Participation in elections is although not the most effective today, but the easiest way to fight.”
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