Russia Holds Parliamentary Elections in Occupied Ukrainian Territories

In mid-September 2026, Russia extended its parliamentary elections into the Ukrainian territories it has occupied since 2022 — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson — framing the three-day vote as an expression of democratic will in lands it claims as its own. Ukraine and the international community rejected the exercise as a violation of sovereignty and international law, seeing in it not a ballot but a blueprint for permanent absorption. The act raises one of the oldest questions in the human story of conquest: at what point does the machinery of governance become the instrument of era