Putin's Party Wins Record Landslide as 49 Ukraine War Veterans Enter Parliament

In a country where the architecture of dissent has been systematically dismantled, Russia's United Russia party has claimed its largest parliamentary majority in history — a result that Western governments and exiled observers read not as democracy's verdict, but as its absence. With 355 of 450 Duma seats secured and every opposition voice either banned, imprisoned, or branded a foreign agent, Vladimir Putin enters the next phase of his war in Ukraine with a legislature that cannot, by design, say no. Elections held in the shadow of invasion, without independent monitors, amid drone strikes on