Smoke rises from the area of the Russian oil producer Gazprom Neft’s Moscow oil refinery as seen from Dzerzhinsky in the Moscow region on September 20, 2026.
AFP | Getty Images
Russia’s ruling United Russia party is on track to comfortably win a tightly controlled wartime election after Ukraine launched what is thought to be the largest drone attack on the Moscow region on the last day of voting.
United Russia, which is supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin, received 57.5% of the parliamentary vote with more than 71% of the ballots counted, data from the Central Election Commission showed. It is the first election to the 450-seat State Duma, the lower house of parliament, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
On Sunday, three people were killed in what Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin described as the “largest enemy drone attack” on Russia’s capital to date. Flames and huge columns of black smoke rose from the city’s outskirts, and a facility at an oil refinery was also damaged.
Russian government officials accused Ukraine, which condemned the Kremlin for having the elections include residents of regions it illegally annexed from Kyiv during the war, of trying to disrupt the election.
The results are expected to shore up the dominant United Russia, which is far ahead of its rivals, after more than four-and-a-half years of war.
All parties on the ballot have broadly pledged loyalty to Putin and his political views. The liberal Yabloko party was the only registered party to oppose the war in Ukraine, but the country’s top court barred it from standing.
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin gives a speech during a ceremony to present state awards in the defence industry sector at the Kremlin in Moscow on September 18, 2026.
Alexander Kazakov | Afp | Getty Images
Elina Ribakova, senior fellow at Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the election shows that United Russia is on course to receive a much higher vote share than in 2021.
“I think it matters for the regime to show the legitimization of it, right? People have voted and just a curious fact, head of Chechen Republic [Ramzan] Kadyrov, for example, got 99.85% of the vote,” Ribakova told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Monday.
“What happens after the election, that’s what really matters,” Ribakova said. “I think Putin himself worries the most about the participants of the war. There will be hundreds of thousands of people who will be coming back, should there be peace or a temporary ceasefire, to Russia facing stagflation: high inflation and zero growth,” she continued.
“This is what Russia calls the most passionate part of the population that the regime needs to be really worried about.”
Zelenskyy to meet Trump in New York
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday said he and U.S. President Donald Trump had agreed to meet in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly this week.
“We agreed to meet in New York, and this meeting could change a lot. There is diplomatic momentum,” Zelenskyy said via social media.
“There are ideas for de-escalation steps and for addressing fundamental security issues – energy security, food security, and the protection of human life. We are working together with the American team and are ready to take really serious steps,” he added.
The Ukrainian president followed his post on meeting Trump by sharing an update on the situation in Zaporizhzhia, after what he called a “vicious” Russian attack overnight.
Residential buildings, a university facility and a shopping mall were among some of the infrastructure damaged in the attack, Zelenskyy said, with five people reported injured.
A separate drone strike in the Kharkiv region killed one person, with Russia striking 10 regions on Sunday evening and throughout the night, Zelenskyy said. “Russia is not backing down from its escalation and is sending many signals that it is ready to expand the war,” he added.
