For the Kremlin, the campaign for the State Duma elections on September 18–20, 2026, amounts to an exercise in holding up the facade of a “patriotic consensus” as the ruling party’s ratings fall and public demand for peace reaches record levels: the Presidential Administration has twice lowered its key targets for turnout and for United Russia’s result, official polling diverges from independent polling by 9–12 p.p., and the decision to admit the pro-peace party Yabloko to the elections, followed by its removal twelve days later, produced a public demonstration of the very antiwar demand that the Kremlin flatly denies exists. Key topics:
The Kremlin’s Plan and Current Ratings
The Pro-Peace Party Yabloko: Removal From the Ballot and Repression
Reset (Perezagruzka): The EK Stratcom Election Campaign and Its Results
Executive Summary
The campaign for the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, is unfolding against a backdrop of a record decline in the authorities’ ratings, the consolidation of public discontent, consistently high demand for peace, and the effective exhaustion of the rally-around-the-flag effect in Russian society.
Admitting the pro-peace systemic party Yabloko to the elections and then removing it twelve days later handed the Kremlin an unplanned public demonstration of the real demand for an end to the war. Aware of the potential of Russian society’s antiwar demand, the Kremlin had cleared the party of its best-known figures well in advance: 12 members are defendants in politically motivated criminal cases and 8 are behind bars, among them the deputy chairs Maksim Kruglov (7 years, sentenced on June 24) and Lev Shlosberg (11 years, on August 17), while a further 12 prominent figures have been designated “foreign agents” and stripped of the right to stand for election.
Even this did not prevent an exponential rise in support for the party immediately after it was registered for the elections: according to the Kremlin-controlled Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), Yabloko’s rating rose from 1% on July 19 to 4% on August 9, and positive attitudes toward the party climbed from 2% to 7% over six months. During the active phase of the campaign the party received 8,000 applications for membership, twice its own membership. While the Supreme Court was hearing the suit seeking the party’s removal from the ballot, spontaneous rallies by Yabloko supporters took place nearby; the last of these was broken up on August 17, with 90 people detained. According to EK Stratcom, closed polling conducted for the Presidential Administration produced figures several times higher than the published ones: roughly 10% nationwide and up to 20% in Moscow.
The mechanics of the party’s removal indicate that the sequence of decisions was not stage-managed by the Kremlin from the outset. The suit against Yabloko filed by the spoiler party Rodina on August 7 invoked copyright infringement, illegal campaigning, foreign funding, and alleged extremism all at once, yet it was put together in a strikingly unprofessional manner, as many specialists on electoral politics pointed out. The court, presided over by Vyacheslav Kirillov, who had previously ruled that the human rights group Memorial was an extremist organization, did not accept all of the plaintiff’s claims, which is likewise indicative of the quality of the suit. The decision to strike the party’s list from the ballot was nonetheless handed down on August 10, upheld on appeal on the 17th, and carried out by the Central Election Commission the following day.
Nezygar, a Telegram channel linked to the Presidential Administration, openly entertains the possibility that “someone in the Kremlin wanted to demonstrate in practice the high level of support for the pacifist position in society,” and acknowledges that the party “would have taken shape as a rallying point for protest and pacifist voting, and that is potentially several times larger than current ratings.”
This, then, is another public manifestation of the conflict inside the system between advocates of a “strategic pause” and the party of “eternal war,” rather than evidence of a single unified line.
At the same time, official polling consistently masks this demand for peace, and the gap between official and independent pollsters is plainly visible. The Kremlin-aligned Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) and FOM put United Russia at 33–36%, with VTsIOM recording a low of 27.3% on April 12, while the independent ExtremeScan, in its July report published on August 14, puts the party at 24%, which is 9–12 p.p. lower. The mechanics of the distortion are evident from that same survey: Russia’s systemic, Kremlin-controlled parties differ not in their declared support for the war but in their willingness to pay an additional price for continuing it, including through a new mobilization. According to ExtremeScan, 56% favor halting hostilities compared with 21% who would accept a new mobilization, and readiness for peace rises from 47% among United Russia voters to 69% among New People voters. This is why Kremlin polls inflate the ratings of United Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) while deflating those of the Communist Party (KPRF) and New People.
The rhetorical differences among the systemic parties on the war, meanwhile, come down to how fiercely each one supports it.
The Kremlin has lowered its own targets for these elections several times, which again demonstrates its diminishing control over the political situation: the 55% turnout and 55% for United Russia set in October 2025 became a 50% turnout target in March 2026, and in July the expected result for the ruling party was also revised downward, to 45%. The pro-Kremlin Agency for Political and Economic Communications, for its part, forecasts turnout of 54–58%, so the reduction is dictated not by an assessment of the Kremlin’s available resources but by a desire to present more “plausible” figures and to head off any post-election consolidation of protest.
Such concerns are voiced publicly as well. On August 20, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova spoke of attempts to whip up “Russophobic hysteria” in Western countries that could push compatriots living abroad into protest actions on the eve of the vote. Central Election Commission chair Ella Pamfilova put it more briefly on August 17: “if you left the country, you betrayed it, so get out.” In the Z-community the anxiety is more candid than in official statements, extending to Anastasia Kashevarova’s conclusion that
“when any decision creates a situation in which enemies will stir up the people,” the questions are “no longer for the enemy but for ourselves.”
The EK Stratcom election campaign Reset (#Perezagruzka) is aimed at precisely the gap that the Yabloko case exposed. It links internet censorship and shutdowns, rising prices, record military spending, and the degradation of infrastructure and social services to the political responsibility borne by the Kremlin and United Russia, arguing that disagreement with the war and the current political course is not marginal but mainstream.
What distinguishes the campaign is that it is run at scale inside Russia’s own censored platforms rather than around them: on VKontakte, the country’s largest social network, 252,000 comments carrying fact-based criticism of the Kremlin, the war, and the authorities were distributed by the campaign between January and July 2026, drawing almost 800,000 likes and 140,000 replies from Russian users. Over the same period the campaign accumulated 157 million in reach across Telegram, YouTube, and TikTok, along with 1.1 million shares, 7 million reactions, and 358,000 comments left by users. Of that reach, 120 million came from short-form video, a format whose audience barely overlaps with the readers of political Telegram channels and YouTube Community posts, where visual cards and explainers generated 37 million.
The Kremlin’s Plan and Current Ratings
The principal task facing the Kremlin’s political managers who oversee domestic politics and electoral processes in the run-up to the State Duma elections on September 18–20, 2026, is to demonstrate that Russian citizens overwhelmingly support the war and Moscow’s aggressive policy course, and that the so-called “patriotic consensus” around Putin still holds in Russian society.
For election administrators and for regional administrations, for whom the elections serve as a stress test of their control over the situation on the ground, two indicators define success: final turnout and the share of the vote won by the ruling party, United Russia. The consolidation of domestic discontent amid Russians’ deep fatigue with the war is, however, forcing adjustments to the Presidential Administration’s plans. In October 2025 these KPIs were set at no less than 55% turnout and 55% for United Russia (1); in March 2026 the turnout figure was revised downward to 50% (2), with the same share for the party; and in July the expected result for United Russia was also lowered, to 45% (3).
The Kremlin’s minimum KPIs for these elections therefore stand at 50% turnout and 45% of the vote for United Russia. This deliberate reduction reflects the Kremlin’s desire to present the public with ostensibly more “plausible” results and thereby prevent any post-election consolidation of protest, a risk about which some independent specialists had warned as early as the beginning of 2026 (4). Regardless of the outcome and of the final results of the systemic parties, the State Duma will remain entirely manageable: every systemic party in Russia is under the full control of Presidential Administration officials, while the real political opposition has either been physically eliminated or forced out of the country and branded “extremists,” “foreign agents,” and “undesirable organizations.”
According to recent forecasts (5) by the pro-Kremlin think tank Agency for Political and Economic Communications, turnout is expected in the range of 54–58% of voters, despite the Kremlin’s tactic of suppressing organic turnout (6). To obtain the results it needs, the Presidential Administration relies on the familiar toolkit of administrative coercion directed at dependent categories of citizens, including pressure applied through employers and on public-sector employees, while abstention among discontented segments of the electorate only strengthens the ruling party’s result.
The Kremlin-controlled Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) and Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) put United Russia’s current rating at 33–36% (7, 8), figures that follow a sharp decline in the spring and summer of 2026 driven by the deteriorating domestic situation in Russia: VTsIOM recorded the party’s low on April 12 (27.3%) and has since shown a slight recovery, while FOM’s current reading remains the lowest it has registered.
That recovery is primarily linked to the active phase of the campaign, which temporarily lifts the ratings of all parliamentary parties, though the effect is particularly pronounced for United Russia thanks to the backing of state propaganda.
The elections themselves, meanwhile, are almost invisible in polling. In a recent FOM survey (9), for instance, campaign-related developments were folded into the “Work of government bodies” category among the key events of the week and drew the attention of only 2% of citizens, and then only in connection with the removal of the pro-peace party Yabloko from the ballot. In FOM’s most recent survey (10), 1% of citizens mentioned the removal.
The independent ExtremeScan records a markedly lower rating for United Russia in its July report published on August 14 (11): the ruling party stands at just 24%, 10–13 p.p. below the figures from the Kremlin’s pollsters. The same report offers a precise analytical account of the role played by the Kremlin’s systemic parties in the current landscape:
United Russia (24% in independent polling vs. 33–36% in Kremlin polls): the party of the war’s beneficiaries and of those with protected status;
the Communist Party (KPRF; 13% vs. 8–11%): the party of channeled social discontent;
the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR; 8% vs. 9–10%): the most mobilized segment of the loyal electorate;
New People (11% vs. 8–10%): the party of the modernizing middle class, whose prospects the war obstructs.
ExtremeScan observes that “the price of the war divides the parties more sharply than abstract support does”: asked about a new mobilization as an instrument for achieving victory in the war, 56% choose a halt to hostilities and only 21% would accept it. Broken down by party, however, the differences are striking: among United Russia and LDPR voters roughly 30% would accept one, compared with 21% for the KPRF and 14% for New People; readiness for peace shows exactly the opposite pattern, with United Russia at 47%, the LDPR at 52%, the KPRF at 59%, and New People at 69%.
These differences explain why the Kremlin’s pollsters inflate the ratings of United Russia and the LDPR while deflating those of the KPRF and New People (see above). The parties’ own rhetoric on the war, meanwhile, differs only cosmetically: the only position the Kremlin’s administrators permit is unambiguous support for the war, and the parties differ solely in how fiercely they express that support.
The Presidential Administration put this approach on clear display in the events surrounding Yabloko, which ran on a pro-peace platform.
The Pro-Peace Party Yabloko: Removal From the Ballot and Repression
Despite its systemic character, its accommodating approach in dealings with the Kremlin, and the direct contacts that its co-founder, Grigory Yavlinsky, has maintained with Putin, the liberal party Yabloko has traditionally taken pro-democracy and pacifist positions and still holds the “parliamentary privilege” that allows it to nominate candidates for the Duma without having to collect voter signatures.
Recognizing the danger of allowing antiwar slogans to circulate legally at a time when Russian society’s demand for peace remains consistently high (62% according to the Levada Center in July (12)), the Kremlin launched a campaign of repression against Yabloko long before the elections, stripping the party of its best-known leaders before the race began: 12 party members are defendants in politically motivated criminal cases (13), and 8 of them are behind bars, including two deputy chairs of the party, Maksim Kruglov and Lev Shlosberg, and 4 heads of regional party branches (Ryazan, Yakutia, Vologda, and Kamchatka).
5 of these cases were opened in 2025, while the rulings on the deputy chairs came in 2026: on June 24 Kruglov was sentenced to 7 years in prison, and on August 17, during the events surrounding Yabloko, Shlosberg was given 11 years. In addition, 12 prominent party members have been designated “foreign agents,” which likewise stripped them of the right to stand for election.
Having purged Yabloko’s pool of potential candidates of well-known politicians, the Kremlin decided to allow the party onto the ballot, counting on this to demonstrate the supposed marginality of the antiwar position in Russian society.
The main events surrounding the party unfolded in late July and early August 2026. On July 29 the Central Election Commission registered Yabloko’s candidate list, after which the leaders of the three other systemic parties, the LDPR, the KPRF, and A Just Russia, publicly attacked the decision, calling Yabloko a “party of traitors” (14) and demanding that it be declared an “undesirable organization” (15).
Nine days later, on August 7, the spoiler party Rodina and its leader Alexei Zhuravlyov petitioned (16) the Supreme Court to revoke Yabloko’s registration, grounding the suit in violations of electoral law: copyright infringement, illegal campaigning, foreign funding, and alleged extremism. The hearing took place on August 10, and at its conclusion Judge Vyacheslav Kirillov, who had previously ruled that the human rights group Memorial was an extremist organization, handed down a decision striking Yabloko’s list from the ballot. Yabloko appealed, and on August 17 the Supreme Court upheld the decision (17). The following day the Central Election Commission removed the party from the ballot papers.
The decisive factor behind the Kremlin’s decision to revoke Yabloko’s registration was the exponential growth in support for the party, driven by its explicit antiwar position and by a broad solidarity campaign mounted by the opposition in exile. That growth was visible in the public sphere and on social media (18), as well as in official polling.
In the single week from August 2 to August 9, for example, FOM recorded (19) the party’s rating rising from 2% to 4%, whereas before registration it had stood at just 1% (July 19). Positive attitudes toward Yabloko also grew, from 2% in mid-February to 7% on August 9. According to EK Stratcom’s sources, closed polling for the Presidential Administration showed figures several times higher:
nationwide Yabloko was drawing around 10%, and in Moscow up to 20%.
Support for the party found expression not merely in passive approval but in more overt political action by its sympathizers: the party received 8,000 new applications for membership (20), twice its total membership, and during the hearings spontaneous political protests took place outside the Supreme Court building, the last of which was broken up on August 17, with 90 people detained (21).
An analysis of the Kremlin’s tactics nevertheless suggests that the sequence of decisions on Yabloko was not a stage-managed campaign from the outset. Had it been, Rodina’s suit seeking Yabloko’s removal from the ballot would have been prepared more professionally (22), and the court would have accepted all of the plaintiff’s claims (23).
The way events developed also points to the continuing intra-elite conflict between the party of a “strategic pause” and the party of “eternal war”: under current conditions of repression and a cleared political field, the initial decision to admit Yabloko to the elections may have served as both an instrument and a test case for that faction to demonstrate publicly the clear popular demand for peace.
This is borne out by a post (24) from Nezygar, a channel linked to the Presidential Administration:
“It is possible that someone in the Kremlin wanted to demonstrate in practice the high level of support for the pacifist position in society,” and “the removal of Yabloko from the elections has only consolidated the fact of significant support for ending the war and for demands for peace negotiations.”
Had Yabloko’s campaign continued, its rating would clearly have kept rising, which is entirely at odds with the Kremlin’s official escalatory course. In Nezygar’s words, the party
“would have taken shape as a rallying point for protest and pacifist voting, and that is potentially several times larger than current ratings,”
and campaigns by professional critics of the Kremlin and by the Russian opposition in exile would only have accelerated that trajectory.
The Kremlin is visibly worried about this: on August 20, for instance, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated:
“In Britain, the Netherlands, Finland, and France we are seeing attempts to whip up another wave of Russophobic hysteria in the media, aimed at delegitimizing the results of the forthcoming vote [...] which could push negatively disposed compatriots living in those countries into protest actions on the eve of the vote or on election day.” (25)
Central Election Commission chair Ella Pamfilova said much the same (26) on August 17:
“This crowd, which fled the country, is becoming more active [...] My view is that if you left the country, you betrayed it, so get out.”
While the Kremlin’s public rhetoric on Yabloko sought to suggest that nothing out of the ordinary was happening, a number of authors in the Z-community voiced open fears that the party’s participation could shatter the illusion of total support for Putin’s aggression.
The major Z-channel Release the KrakenZ! wrote that Yabloko “stood a chance of collecting a record number of votes by becoming a substitute for the ‘none of the above’ option on the ballot, but it fouled it up again by appointing itself the ‘against Russia’ option.” (27)
The Z-blogger Roman Alekhin, designated a foreign agent for criticizing the authorities, warned that under current conditions any pretext, however minor, could produce a consolidation of protest:
“And with the Kanye West concert [it had earlier been reported that a concert by the American rapper is being organized in St. Petersburg], something else worries me. Isn’t there a risk that our ‘esteemed partners’ will turn it into an antiwar event? They will hide behind the notion that art stands apart from war. Then all this fuss around Yabloko and its antiwar rhetoric will look like kindergarten.” (28)
The Z-blogger Anastasia Kashevarova went further still:
“The story of Yabloko’s removal from the elections is not about political competition at all. The story, as I have written, is that either way, whether it was admitted or not, this feeds the narrative of the authorities’ legitimacy [...] And when any decision creates a situation in which enemies will stir up the people and destabilize the country, the questions are no longer for the enemy but for ourselves. It means there is something there to stir up.” (29)
RESET #Perezagruzka): The EK Stratcom Election Campaign and Its Results
The Reset election campaign (#Perezagruzka) by the EK Strategic Communications Center was built as a cross-platform political communications effort that connects everyday social and economic problems with the policies of the Kremlin and United Russia. Alongside this, it consistently advances an alternative narrative:
Russians deserve to live normal, peaceful, and prosperous lives, and the country already has all the resources needed to make that possible.
What sets the campaign apart is its reach on platforms operating under Russian censorship, where it is run at scale. On VKontakte, Russia’s largest social network, 252,000 comments carrying fact-based criticism of the Kremlin, the war, and the Russian authorities were distributed by EK Stratcom between January and July 2026, drawing almost 800,000 likes from Russian users and 140,000 replies that opened discussions of the issues raised.
Across other platforms, the campaign has reached 157 million, and social media users engaged with it directly, leaving 7 million reactions, 1.1 million shares, and 358,000 comments. The campaign focuses on several recurring themes: internet censorship and shutdowns, rising prices and inflation, record wartime spending, deteriorating public services and infrastructure, declining support for United Russia and Vladimir Putin, and growing public demand for peace.
A central claim of the campaign is that opposition to internet restrictions, the war, and the current political course is not marginal but increasingly mainstream and shared across a large part of Russian society.
The campaign’s main content tool is a system of visual cards and short explanatory posts, distributed through Telegram and the YouTube Community tab. Some 2,500 of these were produced between January and July 2026, drawing 37 million in reach. They use polling, statistics, comparisons, and clear examples to show how the political course of the Kremlin and United Russia has failed, what that failure has cost, and why responsibility for it rests with both.
The same narratives and factual material are then adapted into short-form videos for YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok, a little over a thousand videos, which account for 120 million in reach and 6 million reactions within the cross-platform totals cited above. This lets the campaign engage audiences that consume content primarily through video platforms and have little or no exposure to political content on Telegram.
Distribution is amplified by a network of regional media outlets and channels, which regularly publish and adapt Reset (Perezagruzka) materials while promoting the shared Reset (#Perezagruzka) brand. This cross-platform approach enables the campaign to maintain a presence across virtually all major social media platforms and to communicate with different audience groups through text, graphics, and short-form video.
The campaign has ultimately created a single recognizable election narrative across multiple platforms and formats:
the current situation is the result of political choices, not an inevitability; those choices can be changed; and the demand for peace, freedom, and a normal life is far broader than the authorities admit.