Finland

Helsinki, September 21, 2026. For the Finnish press, the victory of United Russia in the Russian legislative elections is no surprise: according to the partial results cited by the Tass agency and reported by Helsingin Sanomat, Vladimir Putin's party won 57.70% of the vote, far ahead of the Communist Party (13.87%) and the LDPR (8.65%). The newspaper recalls that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe judged that this election, the first since the start of the war, does not meet international democratic standards, and that the vote was held for the first time in the annexed regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, where participation would have reached 81%.

MTV Uutiset documents concrete irregularities: in St. Petersburg, a polling station president "would have trampled and torn up ballots" transferred from the ballot box to bags; an observer counted 387 voters when the official minutes recorded 936. The independent site Meduza reports observers being prevented from entering several polling stations, officially due to lack of space.

The election ended on Sunday against a backdrop of massive Ukrainian drone strikes: over 1,600 devices launched in two days, including around 450 towards Moscow, according to Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Governor Andrei Vorobyov mentions 249 drones shot down, while Tass cites 338. A Moscow refinery caught fire and two civilians would have been killed, according to unconfirmed Russian sources not confirmed by Kyiv. Professor Markku Kangaspuro, from the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, sees a Ukrainian message: the strikes show that "the Russian leadership is unable to counter Ukrainian attacks" and to keep its promise of security on the very day of the vote.

This locked-in election resonates all the way to Finland. The Russian Embassy in Helsinki also served as a polling station for Russians living in the country. A Russian diplomatic note requested that no demonstrations be held there on the day of the vote; however, the police authorized a gathering of about forty people in front of the building. Irina Vesikko, president of the Democratic Community of Russian-speakers in Finland, sees this as a necessary gesture, as "no real alternative" was on the ballots except for parties close to Putin. She also notes that the anti-war party Yabloko saw its registration revoked by the Supreme Court after only twelve days of campaigning.