Putin's party dominates Russia's wartime parliamentary election

In the midst of an active military campaign in Ukraine, Russia conducted parliamentary elections that returned Vladimir Putin's United Russia party to dominance — a result that surprised no one, yet whose deeper meaning remains unresolved. The vote unfolded as a kind of wartime ritual, blending the formal gestures of democratic governance with the machinery of a state at war. History has long known such moments: when power stages its own affirmation, the question is never who wins, but what the winning is meant to say.