In Russia’s brutal siege of Mariupol, Vladislav Golovin, a young marine, lost a leg. Just a few years later he now sits in the Duma, Russia’s parliament, and chairs its youth policy committee, thanks to “Time of Heroes”, Vladimir Putin’s scheme to bring veterans into government.
When the new 450-seat Duma convened on September 30th, he was one of the 60 new deputies who had fought in Ukraine. These numbers partly reflected the gains made by United Russia, the ruling party, which increased its seats from 324 in 2021 to 349. But veterans’ electoral success owed more to something else: our analysis suggests that voter fraud increased more sharply in constituencies where they ran.
Reading beneath the official results, Russian voters seem less keen on having ex-soldiers in parliament. This challenges the impression the Kremlin was so eager to create through these Duma elections: that Russia’s official electoral majorities translate into a broad willingness to bear further costs of war.
An uneasy ascent
The enlarged cohort of veterans in the Duma is a test of Putin’s promise to build a “new elite” from returning veterans, which ECFR examined in a recent policy brief. In 2024 the president had pledged to bring them into government and business, preparing another generation to whom he could eventually “entrust” Russia. In doing so, the Kremlin likely sees military service as proof of loyalty to its war project, and therefore a good base from which to gradually build a recruitment pool for future appointments.
For Putin, the value of this pool is in having veterans with some administrative experience available when a more senior vacancy arises. Alexander Shuvaev’s appointment as governor of Belgorod in May illustrates how this can work. Before his promotion, the veteran had a short spell as deputy governor of Irkutsk, allowing him to gain some civilian experience before taking charge of a region bordering Ukraine. The Duma’s committees now offer another training ground: veterans sit on 28 of its 34 committees, but they chair only two.
This policy sits in tension with Russians’ considerable unease about veterans’ return to civilian life. Almost 40% expect veterans’ return to bring more conflict and crime, while others fear a return to the “lawless 1990s”, recalling how veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan joined criminal gangs. This unease surfaces in everyday life, with veterans reporting repeated job rejections once employers learn of their war service.
Beneath the official results
Despite these public attitudes, Putin told the new Duma that veterans had won “broad support” from voters and would “strengthen” parliament. But even the official results offer little evidence of an electoral advantage for veterans. Of the 56 United Russia veterans who entered the Duma, 31 won in single-member constituencies, and their average vote share was the same as or slightly below United Russia’s party-list vote share in the same constituency. Veterans were also within one percentage point of the results achieved by comparable United Russia candidates without a war background in other constituencies.[1]
This lack of support for veterans becomes clearer when looking at the extent the vote was manipulated in their favour. The 2026 Duma elections broke numerous records and were the country’s most heavily rigged parliamentary elections, according to data-driven investigations by Russia’s leading independent media outlets.
Direct fraud, usually ballot stuffing or falsifying polling-station result sheets, can leave statistical traces in official results, which Russian researchers have developed and refined methods for detecting. Their approach examines turnout and candidate or party vote shares across polling stations. In broadly similar areas turnout and vote share vary little, so polling stations tend to form a smooth distribution with a single peak. However, direct fraud increases both recorded turnout and the beneficiary’s vote share, stretching the main cluster into a “comet’s tail”. This makes it possible to identify a “clean” core of polling stations without the statistical anomalies that come with direct manipulation.
Such stations have long been scarce in Russia’s “electoral sultanates”, the 20 to 30 regions where local authorities exercise exceptionally tight control over results. If the Kremlin feared voter resistance to veteran candidates, these “sultanates” would have been logical places to field them. Yet, perhaps owing to Putin’s overconfidence, veterans do not seem to have been concentrated in single-member constituencies with stronger past results for United Russia or greater scope for fraud.
The Komi test
A constituency in Komi, a republic in Russia’s far north, was one such unlikely choice. The incumbent, Oleg Mikhailov of the Communist Party had defeated his pro-Kremlin predecessor in 2021 by 32.4% to 26.8%, despite pressure from the regional authorities. Mikhailov has been an unusually critical voice within the narrow limits of permitted dissent. He did not vote on the annexation of four Ukrainian regions in 2022, proposed amendments to soften the repressive “foreign agents” legislation and kept up cautious calls for peace into the 2026 campaign.
Defeating Mikhailov in this year’s election would have carried symbolic weight for the Kremlin, particularly if his replacement were a war veteran. United Russia nominated Stanislav Kochev, an army officer seriously wounded on the Zaporizhzhia front, who campaigned hard on his military service and support for the war.
Unsurprisingly, Kochev won roughly twice as many votes as Mikhailov in remote electronic voting. Our analysis suggests that direct fraud was also heavily used in polling stations: neighbouring stations recorded opposite outcomes depending on whether independent observers were present. Within the “clean” core, Mikhailov narrowly led Kochev by 32% to 31%. Yet, the official result gave Kochev a decisive victory against Mikhailov, 42% to 24%.
Securing Kochev’s victory seems to have required a big expansion of direct fraud. According to our calculations, the share of Komi’s votes cast in the “clean” core fell from around 94% in 2021 to just 61% in 2026.
A veterans’ penalty
This shift was part of a nationwide pattern: in 2026, only around 18,500 stations (21.3%) were classified as relatively clean, compared with roughly 43,000 (45.2%) in 2021. This deterioration was steeper, on average, in single-member constituencies contested by veterans. Across the 29 such constituencies we compared, the “clean” core fell from 70% to 32% against 61% to 29% in the other 182 constituencies.[2] In some cases, such as St Petersburg — where Vitaly Milonov boasted during his campaign about “killing Ukrainians”—the “clean” core shrank so much since 2021 that our method can no longer detect it.
These findings suggest that the Kremlin’s efforts to secure seats for veterans have accelerated the spread of direct vote manipulation
Results for veterans standing for parties other than United Russia shows they are not popular with voters: none of the 25 veteran candidates these parties fielded in single-member constituencies won a seat. These findings echo earlier reporting on the 2025 regional and municipal elections, when candidates with military ties from several other parliamentary parties won less often than non-military candidates standing for the same parties.
Taken together, these findings suggest that the Kremlin’s efforts to secure seats for veterans have accelerated the spread of direct manipulation in regions where vote counting had previously been relatively clean.
What the results mean for Europe
The Kremlin is continuing to build a loyal cohort of veterans within Russia’s political system. But the analysis above suggests this project has limited electoral appeal and will therefore carry political costs for Putin. A new wave of mobilisation or even aggression against EU countries could meet resistance from Russians reluctant to support the war, and so would require more resources and coercion, even without mass protests. Such costs should inform assessments of Russia’s capacity to escalate, but European governments can’t count on them to prevent the Kremlin from pursuing its ambitions.
Over time, promoting people whose careers and political legitimacy are tied to the war could make a future change of course harder for the Kremlin. Veterans’ advancement creates incentives to defend the policies that brought them into office, even when their promotion has limited electoral appeal. This may gradually narrow the space for moderation within Russia’s political system.
In the medium term, this pattern could widen the gap between the Kremlin’s course of action and sections of Russian society, with voting behaviour offering only a glimpse of public unease. Widespread electoral fraud helped trigger mass protests in 2011. Wartime repression has suppressed a similar response today, but it has not resolved the underlying discontent. This leaves the regime vulnerable to sudden unrest. As in Iran, economic grievances could spark broader political protests which would be met with violent repression. So, as well as preparing for unpredictable Kremlin actions abroad, Europeans may need to plan for sudden instability within Russia too.
[1] Each United Russia veteran contesting a single-member district was matched with three non-veteran candidates from the same party in comparable constituencies (1:3 matching). Matching covariates included prior political experience, United Russia’s constituency-level vote share in 2021, geographical proximity, urban-rural composition of the population in constituencies and some others. Mean vote shares were 47.6% for veteran candidates and 47.1% for the matched comparison group.
[2] Two of the 31 United Russia veterans who won single-member seats are not included. Alexander Borodai’s Donetsk constituency (No. 14) is the occupied territory, for which no polling-station data are available. Magomed Valikhov (Makhachkala, No. 10) ran as a self-nominated candidate and joined the United Russia faction only after the election.