Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree calling for elections to the State Duma of the Russian Federation to be held on 20 September.
It is expected that, as in previous elections, voting will last for three days, with 20 September being the final day of voting. In addition, so-called remote electronic voting will be organised in many regions of Russia.
These will be the first Duma elections since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For the first time, they will also be held in the occupied regions of Ukraine that the Russian authorities have declared as their own – in the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Luhansk regions. Voting has already taken place in occupied Crimea, and neither Ukraine nor the West recognised the legitimacy of those elections.
The elections will be organised on the basis of party lists and 225 single-member constituencies.
Seventeen parties are eligible to stand in the elections, twelve of which may do so without collecting signatures, as they are represented in regional parliaments.
Following the latest tightening of legislation, it has become easier for the Russian authorities to bar certain candidates from standing in the elections. In particular, due to administrative penalties or criminal cases, a number of well-known representatives of the Yabloko and CPRF parties will be barred from standing.
Yabloko remains the only force admitted to the elections that opposes Russia’s war in Ukraine (the party’s official position is to call for peace on both sides). The overwhelming majority of organisations that are anti-war and opposed to Putin’s government have not been admitted to the elections.