Opponents Cry Foul As Kremlin Tightens Grip In Russian Regional Elections

A deadly war that most Russians want to be over rages on with no sign of peace in sight. Inflation is high and the economy is slowing, prompting the head of the biggest state-run bank to warn of the risk of "stagnation."

But the ruling United Russia party, President Vladimir Putin's instrument of power across the country, appears to have swept most of the regional and local elections held on September 12-14, maintaining its grip nationwide and tightening it in some areas.

The elections for 19 regional governors in Russia, 11 regional legislatures, and numerous local offices were marred by claims of fraud. A Communist challenger of an entrenched United Russia governor charged that the elections "are simply being painted," meaning the results are being conjured from thin air by the authorities.

"I urge you to…stop the falsifiers of the electoral process," Aleksandr Safronov, the Communist candidate in the Krasnodar region, said in a videotaped statement addressing Putin's domestic policy chief and the head of the Central Election Commission.

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He claimed turnout figures were inflated -- a common path to inflating results for the ruling party -- and said observers and even election officials were barred from seeing voter lists, preventing them from checking for falsifications.

No surprise there, neither in the fraud allegations nor in the official results, which handed victory to all 19 incumbent regional governors. All but one are members of or were nominated by United Russia, which did not field a candidate in the 19th race.

Meanwhile, in cities like Tomsk and Novosibirsk, United Russia used the elections to reverse gains opponents made in previous balloting through the late Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny's "smart voting" initiative. In the local elections, losses for the ruling party were few and far between.

Pulling The Levers Of Influence

The Kremlin has been increasing its control over politics and elections since Putin came to power a quarter-century ago, using its levers of influence to manipulate elections before, during, and after the voting, analysts say -- from the question of who gets on the ballot to the vote count.

Allegations of massive fraud have come hand-in-hand with Russian elections since at least 2011, when peaceful protests erupted over evidence of electoral violations and dismay at Putin's plan to return to the presidency the following year.

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An award-winning Russian data analyst said Putin may have received 10 million fraudulent votes in the 2018 election, and estimates by media outlets in the 2024 presidential contest put the number somewhere between 20 million and 32 million.

Now, with Putin in his fifth term and a clampdown on dissent still spiraling amid the war on Ukraine, analysts say the Kremlin continues to fine-tune its methods of electoral manipulation.

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"Regional-level politics has almost entirely come over the control of the federal [government] in recent years," Andras Toth-Czifra, a fellow at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on Russia's regions, wrote on BlueSky.

Most genuine opposition groups and individuals have long since been pushed out of the process or worse: Navalny was barred from challenging Putin for the presidency in 2018, survived a nerve-agent poisoning he blamed on Putin in 2020, and died in prison in February 2024, with his widow pointing the finger at Putin. The Kremlin denies any involvement.

The parties that do have representatives in the national parliament and regional legislatures -- mainly the Communist Party, the poorly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and A Just Russia - For Truth -- are seen as convenient foils for United Russia, a "systemic opposition" that bends to the will of the Kremlin when the chips are down.

Nonetheless, Putin's government takes steps aimed to ensure the regional and local elections keep those parties in check.

In the Leningrad and Komi regions, the Kremlin kept Communist candidates for governor off the ballots "by using United Russia's dominance in municipal councils to deny [them] the needed number of supporting signatures," Toth-Czifra wrote in a blog post ahead of the voting.

In Kamchatka, he wrote, A Just Russia – For Truth was "forced to withdraw its support from one of its more popular candidates," former television anchor Aleksandra Novikova, "who was going to run against the unpopular governor."

Tsunami Hits Kamchatka Region Following 8.8-Magnitude Quake

Preliminary results announced by the authorities on September 15 indicated that the incumbent, United Russia member Vladimir Solodov, won with about 63 percent of the vote in Kamchatka, which was hit by an earthquake and tsunami in July.

Several other United Russia incumbents did better than that, securing over 70 percent or over 80 percent of the vote, according to the Central Election Commission.

Communist challenger Safronov received less than 9 percent of the vote in Krasnodar, the commission said, while incumbent Veniamin Kondratyev, already in office for a decade, received about 83 percent.

In the Kursk region, where many citizens felt abandoned by the state after a surprise Ukrainian incursion in August 2024, acting governor Aleksandr Khinshtein secured almost 87 percent of the vote, the commission said -- a result that raised eyebrows given the lingering anger among residents, even though Khinshtein was installed in December.

The Central Election Commission also said the United Russia incumbent won what it called an election in Sevastopol, a port city in Ukraine's Russian-occupied Crimea region, which Putin baselessly claims is part of Russia.

Leaders Wary Of War Veterans

In another sign that Putin and his government are eager to suppress any potential challenge to their grip on the country, a much-hyped plan to bring veterans of Russia's war against Ukraine into governance fell flat in the September 12-14 elections, whether by chance or by design of a Kremlin wary of empowering a force that could prove difficult to control.

"What we observe are entirely hollow, fictitious efforts by the state to inflate this narrative and promote the political participation of war veterans," Kirill Martynov, editor in chief of the Latvian-based media outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe, told Current Time.

"In reality, only about 1.5 percent of people running as candidates at any level across Russia, including in numerous municipal elections, are war participants."

Martynov suggested that despite the Kremlin campaign promoting the idea that veterans of the invasion could become a new elite, Putin and his circle are queasy about the idea.

"It's quite clear that if there exists any political elite in Russia today, it understands very well the danger that the end of the war poses to the stability of its own power," he said.

"It's obvious they understand that up to 1 million people who went through the war and will eventually return to the country could become a major new force in public life. And those who have already been wealthy, famous, or successful within Putin's system are unlikely to welcome this development."

In a poll conducted by the independent Levada-Center in August, about 66 percent of respondents said it was time to move to peace talks -- the highest proportion since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

RFE/RL's Russian Service and Current Time contributed to this report.