Votes also took place in Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. (Representative)
Moscow:
Russia claimed on Sunday that the United Russia party, which staunchly supports President Vladimir Putin, had won local elections in four Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions.
The Kremlin claimed last year to have annexed the eastern and southern territories, despite not having full military control over them. The elections have been dismissed as a sham by Ukraine and its allies.
Data published by Moscow and proxy officials show that voters in the war-torn areas, where Ukraine is lagging behind, backed United Russia with more than 70 percent of the vote in each area, state news agencies reported.
The polls, also being held across Russia, took place ahead of next year’s presidential elections, which are expected to extend Putin’s rule until at least 2030.
His opponents are in exile or in prison, and Moscow has criminalized criticism of the conflict in Ukraine and arrested thousands of people for speaking out.
Authorities set up mobile polling booths days before the election in the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions, where Moscow said a polling station was attacked by a Ukrainian drone.
In Donetsk, which has been partly controlled by separatists since 2014, Kremlin-installed authorities said Ukrainian shelling had injured election officials.
Votes also took place in Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.
Ukrainian security services said they had compiled a list of “collaborators” who helped organize the election and promised retaliation.
– ‘Living in peace’ –
In Rostov-on-Don, a southwestern city close to the Ukrainian border that came under drone attack this week, two voters told AFP the conflict was their main concern.
“We just want to live in peace with our children,” says 40-year-old Nina Antonova.
“Everyone is worried about this one problem: the war. We have no other worries,” said 84-year-old Anatoli, a retiree who declined to give his last name.
In Moscow, where a mayoral election also took place, there were few campaign posters.
Incumbent Sergei Sobyanin – a Siberian-born Kremlin loyalist who has been in office since 2010 – won a “convincing” re-election, a senior election official said.
In his thirteen years at the helm of Europe’s largest city, Sobyanin has overseen countless mega-projects that have transformed Moscow’s skyline.
In 2013, he was nearly defeated by anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny.
Navalny, who rejected the vote behind bars, was jailed in 2020 on old fraud charges that his allies said were a pretext to end his political work.
Sobyanin defeated the grandson of a veteran communist politician and a little-known candidate of a new party called “New People”.
Moscow residents had praised Sobyanin before the vote for modernizing the city.
“Moscow is blossoming before our eyes,” 21-year-old student Rukhin Aliyev told AFP.
Musician Kirill Lobanov said Sobyanin had done “very well” as mayor, especially “in the last year” marked by the conflict.
Sobyanin has downplayed increasing Ukrainian drone attacks on Moscow, which have hit the Kremlin and crashed into the capital’s iconic financial district.
– ‘Major alarm’ –
In the regions bordering Ukraine where attacks occur regularly, voting continued with additional security measures.
The head of the electoral commission, Ella Pamfilova, said the vote was postponed in Shebekino, a district of the Belgorod region hit by shelling, “due to a regime of high alert.”
Observers say one of the few competitive races in Russia’s 11 time zones took place in remote Siberia’s Khakassia, where Governor Valentin Konovalov is seeking re-election.
The 35-year-old communist defeated a Kremlin-backed candidate in 2018 after a wave of rare protests in the sparsely populated mountainous region.
In this year’s campaign, he initially faced Moscow-backed candidate Sergei Sokol, who portrayed himself as a Kremlin-decorated “hero” fighting in Ukraine.
Sokol dropped out at the last minute due to health reasons. Konovalov is one of the few regional leaders not supported by the Kremlin who remains in office.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
