President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party is expected to win Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Russia without any surprise, in a poll marked by Ukrainian drone attacks and cyberattacks, AFP reports.

According to an exit poll conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VCIOM), United Russia won 49.4% of the vote, roughly the same result as in 2021, after three days of voting amid the war in Ukraine.

The elections unfolded without suspense in a country where dissent is being harshly repressed by the authorities and where the only party openly opposed to the war, Yabloko, was excluded.

Facing the Kremlin’s party, the only formations admitted to participate were those supporting Vladimir Putin and the continuation of the conflict in Ukraine to varying degrees – the Communists from KPRF, nationalists from LDPR, conservatives from A Just Russia and liberals from the New People party.

The Communist Party and the nationalist LDPR are credited with 14.2% and 10.7% of the vote respectively.

These parliamentary elections, the first since the beginning of the large-scale offensive against Ukraine in 2022, are intended to renew all 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament. They were also held in Ukrainian territories occupied and annexed by Russia.

A reminder of the reality of a conflict marked in recent months by an intensification of attacks on both sides of the front came on Sunday morning, when the final day of voting was marked by a Ukrainian attack involving more than 1,000 drones, which hit a refinery and residential areas and caused fires.

At least two people were killed and around 20 others were injured, according to the Russian authorities.

A Ukrainian drone also struck a bus in the Russian-controlled Kherson region in southern Ukraine, killing two people, including an employee of the Central Election Commission, it announced.

In Moscow itself, a major refinery was damaged, according to Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who denounced the attack as “unprecedented” and “clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections”. “The enemy failed,” he added, noting that more than 1,600 drones had been shot down by Russian air defences, including “450 heading towards Moscow”.

During the evening, the Russian Defence Ministry said Moscow would “continue and intensify” its attacks using “high-precision weapons against military targets in Kyiv” in response to the attacks.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine’s attacks “had a very significant impact in the Moscow region”, claiming that around ten different types of weapons had been used.

At the same time, the Election Commission announced that it had observed “more than a thousand” waves of cyberattacks intended to overwhelm the electronic voting system with requests, as well as attacks against “Russia’s telecommunications infrastructure as a whole”.

These DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are intended to saturate a system with unceasing waves of requests.

“The attacks were carried out by extremely professional and well-coordinated groups, using artificial intelligence tools,” said the Commission’s chairwoman, Ella Pamfilova, referring to attempts that showed “signs of Ukrainian interference”.

Pamfilova had previously reported a “powerful cyberattack” that took place on Saturday but did not destroy the systems.

These elections took place against a tense social backdrop, with Russia facing Western economic sanctions, regular Ukrainian attacks, fuel shortages and restrictions on internet service in several regions.

Source: AGERPRES