Ukraine yesterday launched what Moscow’s mayor called the biggest drone attack yet on the Russian capital, as Russians voted on the final day of a parliamentary election that Russian President Vladimir Putin has cast as a test of support for the war in Ukraine.
The drone strikes killed two people in the Moscow region and two more in the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Kherson region, including an election official, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and election authorities said.
A facility at Moscow’s oil refinery, which has been targeted before, was also damaged.
Photo: AFP
“The biggest attack by enemy drones has been repelled,” Sobyanin said on Telegram. “This unprecedented attack was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections. The enemy did not succeed.”
The State Duma vote, the first since Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, is expected to see the ruling United Russia party easily retain its dominance in a political system critics say does not tolerate dissent.
The Kremlin is likely to present the outcome as evidence of public backing for Putin’s policies and for the war, now in its fifth year with no sign of ending soon.
The election authorities say the three days of voting have proceeded smoothly despite cyberattacks reported on Saturday.
Turnout was more than 50 percent by early afternoon in Moscow, Interfax news agency reported, citing the Russian Central Election Commission.
Most anti-war candidates have been barred from the ballot.
Those who did run from the liberal Yabloko party, which has polled in the single digits in the past few years but hoped to tap into war fatigue, said they feared for their freedom after courts handed long jail terms to two senior party figures before the vote for comments about the conflict.
Discrediting the army or spreading what authorities regard as fake news is punishable by lengthy prison sentences.
In an act of defiance, Yabloko’s leader, Nikolai Rybakov, demonstrably spoiled his ballot paper, writing his party’s name and the slogan “for peace.”
The Kremlin says national unity and some censorship are necessary during what it calls its special military operation in Ukraine. It casts the conflict — Europe’s deadliest since World War II — as part of an existential struggle with a hostile West.
Moscow says Ukrainian intelligence services and other enemies are stepping up efforts to stir unrest inside Russia.
Russian electoral officials on Saturday said that an online voting system in Moscow had come under cyberattack. Kyiv, which has suspended elections under martial law, has dismissed the Russian vote as a “pseudo election.”
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