On September 25, Russia’s Central Election Commission finished counting the results and announced the composition of the ninth State Duma. United Russia won 349 of the 450 seats. The Communist Party received 37, the LDPR 23, New People 19, and A Just Russia 17. Rodina won one seat, and four more went to independents. Never before has the ruling party held such a large majority. (Interfax.ru)

The new Duma differs from the previous one not only in the number of United Russia deputies. Today’s Duma is a war Duma.

The Central Election Commission itself counted 46 participants and veterans of the so-called “special military operation” among the newly elected deputies. Forty-one of them ran on the United Russia ticket. In other words, the Russian state itself officially considers nearly one in ten deputies an SVO veteran. (Vedomosti)

And those are only the ones for whom the Central Election Commission checked the appropriate box.

Meduza reviewed the biographies of future deputies before the final distribution of mandates and found a very different picture. The preliminary composition included 54 people with a direct connection to the war: servicemen, commanders, military medics, and instructors. Another 94 had previously been directly involved in sustaining the war. Eighty-one raised money, purchased equipment, and supplied the army. Five were involved in military training or military infrastructure. Four worked with wounded SVO veterans and veterans’ programs. Another four were classified by the outlet as military propagandists. That makes 148 people in total, roughly one-third of the future chamber. Individual names may have changed after the final redistribution of mandates, but the overall proportion is unlikely to have changed much. (Meduza)

The war has acquired its own faction in the ninth Duma. Today, it is the most influential one.

From Mariupol to Okhotny Ryad

Among the new deputies are people whose biographies, until recently, would have looked more at home in battlefield reports than on the parliament’s website.

Colonel General Alexander Lapin commanded Russia’s Central Group of Forces during the first months of the invasion. In June 2026, a Ukrainian court sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment on charges of violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity and waging a war of aggression. Lapin is now a member of the State Duma. (Meduza)

The notorious Adam Delimkhanov commanded Chechen units during the assault on Mariupol. A joint report by Human Rights Watch, Truth Hounds, and SITU Research included him among Russian commanders who, according to the report’s authors, may bear responsibility for war crimes committed in the city. (Meduza)

Alexander Borodai was the first “prime minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and later commanded the St. George Brigade. In Ukraine, he was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison. (Meduza)

Vladislav Golovin, call sign Struna, commanded a platoon in the 810th Naval Infantry Brigade and fought in Mariupol. After being seriously wounded, he went on to head Yunarmiya, Russia’s militarized youth organization. Ukrainian military intelligence accuses him of organizing military training for Ukrainian children in the occupied territories. (Meduza)

Nursultan Mussagaleyev served in the 104th Air Assault Regiment. Ukraine’s Security Service accuses him of involvement in the abduction, torture, and killing of a civilian in the Kyiv region. He will now be helping pass federal laws in Russia. (Meduza)

According to journalistic investigations, Kirill Tikhonovich served with the Wagner Group and later commanded a unit of Redut, a formation linked to Russian military intelligence. Eduard Kazymov fought in the naval infantry, commanded a sniper platoon and an air assault company, and later joined the leadership of an organization producing FPV drones for the Russian military. (Meduza)

This is no longer the familiar Russian practice of giving a few retired generals seats in parliament. The war has become a кадровый резерв for legislative power.

And the process reaches far beyond the Duma. It is spreading through the regions as well. On September 28, Ella Pamfilova told Putin that 655 participants in the SVO had been elected at all levels of government. Of them, 573 represented United Russia. (Interfax.ru)

The system really is cultivating the “new elite” Putin promised. And by now it is clear what kind of state this elite is being prepared for, and what kind of elite it is meant to be.

Propaganda Has Won Seats Too

In Meduza’s preliminary count, there were four military propagandists: Yevgeny Poddubny, Irina Kuksenkova, Marina Kim, and Vyacheslav Nikonov. (Meduza)

Poddubny has worked for years as a military correspondent for VGTRK and today serves as the broadcaster’s deputy director general. The United Kingdom sanctioned him back in 2022 specifically for spreading Kremlin propaganda in support of the invasion. In 2024, Putin awarded him the title Hero of Russia. (Meduza)

Marina Kim traveled to occupied territories and made films about Russian servicemen. Irina Kuksenkova worked as a war correspondent and took part in projects supporting veterans. Vyacheslav Nikonov has for years hosted The Great Game on Channel One, where Russia’s invasion is presented as a war not merely against Ukraine but against the “collective West.” (Meduza)

These people, rightly described as propagandists, have spent years explaining to their audiences why the war is necessary, why Russia is fighting not only Ukraine, why defeat is impossible, and why the continuation of war should be accepted as the country’s normal condition.

Now they will conduct that propaganda from parliamentary seats.

There are figures for whom even the label “propagandist” is not enough. They themselves have long been producers of military hysteria.

In August 2026, Alexei Zhuravlyov spoke about the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine: “If necessary, we are obliged to use them.” Earlier, he had called for nuclear tests, threatened strikes against European countries, and said that a major war between Russia and Europe would be nuclear. This is no longer merely support for war. It is the public normalization of nuclear war by a sitting member of parliament. (Telegram)

Pyotr Tolstoy has demanded that the war be fought to the end and that negotiations take place “in Kyiv or Lviv.” As the eighth Duma completed its term, he separately reported that 183 of the 2,980 laws it had passed were directly related to the SVO. (Telegram)

It is impossible to count every militarist in the new Duma. Nor is it necessary. Its composition itself leaves no room for normal, reasonable politicians.

The Parliament They Drew on Paper

In theory, all of this could be discussed as a political choice made by Russian society itself, were it not for the mass falsification of the election.

The Central Election Commission announced an official turnout of 59.80 percent. United Russia was credited with 57.83 percent of the party-list vote and awarded 349 seats. (Telegram)

Important Stories took the Central Election Commission’s own data and applied Sergei Shpilkin’s method to the paper vote. The result was almost obscene: of roughly 30 million paper votes credited to United Russia, about 18.4 million fell within the statistically anomalous portion of the distribution. According to the outlet’s calculation, without that anomaly the ruling party would have received about 35 percent. The analysis did not include Moscow’s electronic voting or remote electronic voting in another 32 regions. (iStories)

In other words, this is not about a few ballot boxes into which a precinct chairperson slipped a stack of ballots in the middle of the night.

It is about mass falsification involving millions of votes.

Novaya Gazeta Europe used a different method but reached essentially the same result. According to its calculations, the level of support for United Russia on precincts showing no obvious signs of interference was about 34 percent. The outlet considers only about one-fifth of the precincts it studied to have produced credible results. It also identified 534 precincts in 43 territorial election commissions where, according to statistical analysis, roughly 94,000 votes were added to A Just Russia. That was enough to push the party above the five-percent threshold. Researchers also found about 49,000 similarly anomalous votes for the LDPR in Moscow and the Moscow region. (Novaya Gazeta Europe)

Meduza used its own methodology and arrived at the same overall diagnosis. The number of precincts with anomalously round turnout and vote-share figures rose from roughly 1,300 in 2021 to about 2,250 in 2026, even though the analysis at that point did not yet cover all published protocols. Compared with previous Duma campaigns, the outlet called the 2026 election the most dishonest parliamentary election of the Putin era. (Meduza)

A few weeks before the vote, the Supreme Court removed Yabloko’s federal party list from the election. Yabloko was the only registered party openly opposing the war. The formal grounds were set out in the court ruling, and the appeal was rejected on August 17. (Supreme Court of the Russian Federation)

Russia did not invite OSCE observers at all. ODIHR said that this violated commitments Russia had undertaken as an OSCE participating State. (ODIHR)

For the first time, a federal election was conducted using GAS Vybory 2.0. The day before voting began, Important Stories published an investigation based on internal materials from the system’s developer. Journalists described the ability to alter protocols, work with voter lists, and upload electronic voting results without the degree of external verification one would expect from a federal election system. The existence of a technical capability does not by itself prove that it was used. But it hardly inspires confidence in a procedure that cannot be independently verified. (iStories)

First, the anti-war alternative was removed from the ballot. Then international observers were kept out. Then the election was falsified. And finally, the Putinists declared victory.

Is Such a Duma Lawful?

The Russian Constitution is remarkably clear. Under Article 3, the bearer of sovereignty and the only source of power in the country is the people. The highest direct expression of that power is free elections. (Russian Ministry of Justice)

Not elections in general. Free elections.

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights says the same thing in different words. Article 25 requires “genuine periodic elections” that guarantee the free expression of the will of the electors. The UN Human Rights Committee further states that elections must be conducted fairly and freely, and that governmental authority must continue to be based on the freely expressed will of the electorate. (UN Press)

This is where the line between law and right runs.

Inside the Russian state machine, the ninth Duma will be perfectly real. Deputies will receive their credentials. They will gather on Okhotny Ryad. They will vote. The Federation Council will approve. Putin will sign. The text will be published, a court will apply it, and a police officer will enforce it.

But modern law is not reducible to a state’s ability to print a rule in Rossiyskaya Gazeta and station a police officer beside it. Modern constitutional law rests on the legitimacy and freedom of the process by which public authority is created, with the consent of citizens expressed through genuine elections as its source. That is why the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights explicitly describes the will of the people as the basis of legitimate governmental authority. (UN Human Rights)

If a parliamentary mandate is produced by a system in which genuine political competition has been destroyed, the only anti-war party has been removed, independent international observation is absent, electronic voting is opaque, and millions of paper ballots fall within statistical anomalies, then the problem is no longer merely the violation of several provisions of election law.

The problem is the very right of the authorities to speak in the name of the people.

Can one say that every law passed by the ninth Duma is legally null and void? From the standpoint of substantive law, yes. But the repressive machine built by Putin will ensure that those laws are enforced.

As a result, such laws may be binding through the force of state coercion while simultaneously lacking normal democratic legitimacy.

Why Putin Needs a War Duma

After the election, Putin addressed participants in the war and described the result as a vote of support for them. “People believe in you, people believe in our victory,” he said, once again promising that all the goals of the war would be achieved. (Meduza)

The authorities did not merely bring SVO veterans into parliament. They themselves tied their election directly to support for the war.

At the same time, Putin’s ruling circle has spent months imitating discussions about negotiations, mediators, peace plans, and possible compromises. One can argue about how seriously the Kremlin takes any particular negotiating channel. Its кадровая policy says something else: the Russian state is not preparing for political demobilization.

War veterans are being sent into parliament. War correspondents are being turned into deputies. Organizers of military supply networks are being brought into federal politics. A military biography is becoming an advantage in United Russia primaries. SVO veterans are being moved en masse into regional and municipal government. People whose fame and careers were created by the war are being turned into a political class.

That кадровая policy sends a clear signal: Putin is preparing for the continuation of the war and for further escalation.

A leader who expects to end a war and return the country to civilian life begins thinking about demobilization. Putin is thinking about where to place veterans, commanders, war correspondents, and organizers of the military infrastructure. And he is placing them in parliament.

That is why the ninth State Duma matters not because of the laws it will pass in its first year. The direction of those “laws” is already more or less clear. The previous Duma passed repressive legislation with almost no resistance, and over five years 183 laws were directly connected to the war and its support. (Telegram)

Today, for the first time, Putin has a parliament formed after four and a half years of full-scale war. And into that parliament has come a generation of people whose political capital was created by this war, by taking part in it, sustaining it, or propagandizing it.

War has ceased to be an exceptional circumstance for the Russian state.

It has entered the flesh and blood of Russian society and acquired parliamentary mandates.