In mid-September 2026, Russia conducted parliamentary elections that were less a contest of competing visions than a formal ceremony of consolidation — held while its military pressed deeper into Ukraine and its political landscape grew narrower by design. The absence of meaningful opposition was not an accident of circumstance but the product of years of deliberate legal and institutional reshaping. What the world witnessed was not democracy in crisis, but democracy as theater: a ritual whose outcome was largely authored before the curtain rose.