Elections in the occupied territories. Who is running where and for what

In September of 2026, elections to the State Duma of the Russian Federation will be held for the first time in the occupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. Unlike any ordinary Russian region of “Russia,” here the decision to hold voting was made separately after consultations with the Ministry of Defense and the FSB.

The main arrangement is the federal list of “United Russia.” The four occupied regions were not distributed among neighboring regions and were not given separate lists. They were combined into one group No. 57 with 20 candidates — even more than the United Russia combined group across 11 Far Eastern regions.

And heading this group are not Pushilin, not Pasichnyk, not Balytskyi, and not Saldo. The first four of the five top positions are State Duma deputy Viktor Vodolatskyi, former ombudsman Tetyana Moskalkova, State Duma deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov, and Admiral Volodymyr Kasatonov, Chief of Staff of the Russian Navy. Three of them did not even appear among the primary winners — the party simply placed them “from above.”

For comparison: within Russia itself, governors lead 54 of 57 United Russia groups. In the occupied territories — none of the four occupation leaders is in the first position. A stark signal of the future “after the elections” for the collaborators.

Lower down the list the picture is the opposite: deputies of the occupation “people’s councils” of the DNR and LNR, a “senator” from Zaporizhzhia region, the head of the “People’s Front” in Luhansk. In the single-mandate districts — the same two-tier structure: in Donetsk region among the candidates is z-war correspondent of Channel One Iryna Kuksenkova and former “prime minister of the DNR” Oleksandr Borodai; in Zaporizhzhia — a candidate moved in from occupied Crimea, not a local collaborator.

However, formal competition also exists — in Donetsk region 15 candidates from six parties have been registered. But both the CPRF and LDPR build their lists according to the same principle: the son of the slain DNR leader Oleksandr Zakharchenko is nominated by the CPRF, and the head of the CPRF faction in the occupation “People’s Council” is also CPRF. In essence, the opposition exists exclusively within the bounds of the occupation nomenklatura, not outside it.

The party gives participants in the war +25% added to their primary results and further training at the Higher Party School. A newly built political “funnel”: war participant or collaborator → primaries → party status → parliamentary mandate.

The overall pattern of the campaign is this: the top of the lists is controlled by Moscow through federal political and military personnel, while the middle and lower ranks are filled by the local administrative-political network formed after the occupation. Elections here are not about representation of the population of the occupied territories, but about cementing and subordinating the already-prepared collaborationist elite to the federal center.