Russia finished three days of voting on Sunday for its parliament, the first national vote since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and for the first time the ballot reached four Ukrainian regions Moscow holds by force. The Associated Press watched voters in Donetsk drop ballots into a box while an armed Russian soldier stood by. The only registered party opposing the war had been struck from the list in August. The Church has spoken on this, writing in 2004 about a right to vote that is “only formally proclaimed,” and this weekend is what that teaching looks like on the ground.
The News Story
Russians completed three days of voting on Sunday in an election for the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, the first national legislative vote since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. All 450 seats were contested, half filled from party lists and half in single-mandate races. Polls were open Friday through Sunday, a schedule Russian officials say raises turnout among roughly 111 million eligible voters. Voters in 11 regions also chose governors, and 39 regions elected legislatures.
For the first time, the Duma vote extended into the four Ukrainian regions Moscow annexed in September 2022: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Russian authorities put the number of voters there above 3.5 million. Moscow has never held full control of any of the four, and the annexation has no international recognition. Balloting also took place in Crimea, seized in 2014.
Voting in the annexed regions and in some Russian districts near the border opened at the end of August, weeks ahead of the rest of the country. Officials cited security. The Associated Press reported that at one polling station in the Russian-held part of Donetsk, voters dropped ballots into a box while an armed Russian soldier stood nearby and watched.
President Vladimir Putin said in a speech Wednesday that residents of those regions would vote for the Duma “for the first time since their reunification with Russia,” and that Russian soldiers in the fighting would also cast ballots. He told voters their “choice and resolve will once again demonstrate that millions of people stand behind our fighters.”
United Russia, the governing party backing Putin, went into the vote holding 310 seats and needs 300 to keep the supermajority that allows constitutional changes without other parties. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin headed its list, followed by war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny. In August the Supreme Court removed Yabloko, the only registered party opposing the war, from the party-list ballot, citing among its reasons that an antiwar position amounted to seeking a violation of Russia’s territorial integrity. Yabloko continued to run candidates in single-mandate races. The Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, A Just Russia and New People also competed. OSCE observers were not invited to monitor the vote.
Ukrainian officials called the balloting on occupied territory illegal, urged foreign governments and international organizations to withhold recognition, and warned that helping organize it could carry criminal liability. A coalition of nine Ukrainian human rights groups told residents to stay away from the polls. European Commission spokesperson Christian Wigand called the voting “another blatant violation of international law” and said the European Union would never recognize it or its results.
Violeta Artemchuk of the Donbas SOS human rights group said election commission members went house to house escorted by Russian troops and security agents, that public-sector workers were threatened with dismissal if they did not vote, and that pensions and other social payments were made conditional on taking part. Volodymyr Fesenko, an analyst at the Kyiv-based Penta Center, told the AP that “elections held at gunpoint are a farce.” Russian authorities have rejected allegations of widespread fraud in past elections.
Results were expected after polls closed Sunday, with near-complete counts Monday. United Russia has won every Duma election since Putin came to power in 2000. [1]
Catholic Social Teaching Analysis
Let’s begin with the number Moscow wants you to remember: 3.5 million. That’s how many voters Russian authorities say live in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, four Ukrainian regions Russia holds by force, has never fully controlled, and annexed in a ceremony no other government recognizes. This weekend those people were counted as electors of the Russian State Duma for the first time. The president said what the count was for on Wednesday: their “choice and resolve will once again demonstrate that millions of people stand behind our fighters.”
So the Catholic question is a narrow one. United Russia has won every Duma election since 2000, and Monday’s count will surprise nobody. The question is, what is a vote, what does it do, and whether the thing that happened at a polling station in Donetsk, where the AP watched people drop ballots into a box while an armed Russian soldier stood by, fits that description.
What A Vote Is For
The Church has a definition, and it’s more precise than most civics classes. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church calls participation in public life “one of the pillars of all democratic orders and one of the major guarantees of the permanence of the democratic system.” Then it says what a democratic government actually is: it “is defined first of all by the assignment of powers and functions on the part of the people, exercised in their name, in their regard and on their behalf.” [2]
Power moves from the people to the government. A ballot is the instrument of that assignment; it’s the moment a person hands over a share of authority and keeps the receipt. That’s why the Church cares about elections at all: she has a large stake in whether the people are the ones doing the assigning.
Pope John Paul II, who had lived most of his life under a government that held elections it could not lose, put the test in three parts. In Centesimus Annus he wrote that “the Church values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate.” The next sentence is the warning: the Church “cannot encourage the formation of narrow ruling groups which usurp the power of the State for individual interests or for ideological ends.” [3]
Electing, holding accountable, replacing. Run this weekend through all three. In August the Supreme Court removed Yabloko, the only registered party opposing the war, from the party-list ballot, and one stated reason was that an antiwar position amounts to seeking a violation of Russia’s territorial integrity. So, on the largest question facing the country, replacing the people in charge through peaceful means was struck off before a ballot was printed. Holding them accountable requires someone independent to look, and the OSCE wasn’t invited. What’s left is electing, and even that word is carrying more than it can bear.
The Sentence Written For This Week
The Compendium was published in 2004, and it has a paragraph that reads as if someone had the Donetsk polling station in mind. It lists the ways participation dies. In “countries ruled by totalitarian or dictatorial regimes,” it says, “the fundamental right to participate in public life is denied at its origin, since it is considered a threat to the State itself.” Then it names a second kind of country, where “this right is only formally proclaimed while in reality it cannot be concretely exercised.” [4]
Formally proclaimed. That’s the whole weekend in two words. The ballots were printed. The boxes were on the street. Voting ran three days, and in the annexed regions it opened at the end of August, weeks before anyone else in Russia could vote. Every formal element of an election was present, which is what the Compendium describes: a right that exists on paper and nowhere else.
Violeta Artemchuk of Donbas SOS, a Ukrainian human rights group, says election commission members went house to house escorted by Russian troops and security agents, that public-sector workers were told they’d lose their jobs if they didn’t vote, and that pensions and social payments were conditioned on taking part. I’ll be careful with that. It’s one side’s account, and Russian authorities have rejected fraud allegations before. But two facts in this story come from nobody’s press office. The soldier at the ballot box is the AP’s own reporting. The removal of the antiwar party is the ruling of Russia’s own Supreme Court. Take only those two, and you already have a right that cannot be concretely exercised.
A pension you keep by voting is a vote that runs the wrong direction. Power moves from the state to the citizen, in the form of a threat, and the ballot is the receipt the state keeps.
Aquinas On A Law That Is Really Violence
The Catechism adds a word the story needs. “If authority belongs to the order established by God,” it says, “the choice of the political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free decision of the citizens.” Then this: “Regimes whose nature is contrary to the natural law, to the public order, and to the fundamental rights of persons cannot achieve the common good of the nations on which they have been imposed.” [5]
Imposed. A Duma seat for Kherson is a regime imposed on a nation, and the Catechism says such a regime cannot achieve the common good of that nation, whatever the turnout. In the next paragraph, the Catechism reaches for St. Thomas Aquinas. In the Summa, Thomas says a human law “has the nature of law in so far as it partakes of right reason,” and then: “in so far as it deviates from reason, it is called an unjust law, and has the nature, not of law but of violence.” [6]
Violence. When the form of law is wrapped around something unreasonable, what you’re holding is violence in a legal costume. An election for the parliament of the occupying power, held on ground the occupier took by war, under the eyes of the occupier’s soldiers, is the form of law wrapped around a war. Thomas also notes that an unjust law “retains some appearance of law,” and that’s precisely what the exercise was for. The appearance is the product. Three and a half million voters become a figure a foreign minister can cite, and the man who ordered the vote told you on Wednesday which speech it’s for.
John Paul II drew the same line. The rule of law, he wrote, is the principle “in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals,” and he traced totalitarianism to “a denial of truth in the objective sense,” after which “the force of power takes over.” [7] A ballot cast beside a rifle is that sentence with a photograph.
What Leo XIV Adds
Pope Leo XIV, in Magnifica Humanitas this spring, wrote that “war is not only fought, but also culturally conditioned through simplistic narratives, a friend-or-foe mentality, disinformation and fear.” [8] A wartime election staged in the occupied regions is that conditioning turned into a civic ritual. Leo’s point is that this kind of manufactured story is part of how a war keeps going, so a Catholic reading the turnout figures on Monday should treat them the way you’d read a leaflet dropped from a plane.
Here is where the development matters. In the same chapter, Leo called the “just war” theory “now outdated,” keeping only “the right to self-defense in the strictest sense,” and he named dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness as the tools that replace it. [8] Under the older framework, a Catholic could have filed this weekend under internal Russian politics and stayed out of it. Leo closes that door. “In some conflicts,” he writes, “it is unjust to remain neutral, nor is it enough merely to claim that we are not complicit.” And he asks the Church to give “space to the perspectives and voices of victims,” because doing so helps us “reject the normalization of conflict.” [9] A ballot box under guard in Donetsk is a normalization device, and the Church’s answer to it is to listen to the person who was walked to the box.
What To Do With The Number
Two things, and neither requires an opinion about Russian domestic politics. When the 3.5 million figure shows up in a headline this week, remember that the Compendium’s phrase for it is “formally proclaimed,” and that the people behind the number had their pensions on the table. And pray for them by name: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, along with the Russians who wanted to vote against the war and found the one party that would let them, struck from the ballot by their own court.
Then hold on to the definition, because we’ll need it in 6 weeks. A vote is the people assigning power to a government, in their name and on their behalf. Everything else is a receipt for something the state already took.
This story turns on participation: the Church’s teaching that a vote is the people’s assignment of power to a government, and that a right to vote which is only formally proclaimed is no participation at all.
One principle from the Church’s social teaching, applied to the week’s news, in your inbox each Saturday.
Footnotes
- “Russia holds parliamentary vote in areas it seized from Ukraine in the war,” Associated Press via NPR, September 19, 2026, npr.org; “‘Voters get to choose, just not the result’: Russia’s parliamentary election reaches occupied Ukraine,” Fox News, accessed September 20, 2026, foxnews.com; “Russia’s parliamentary election: Who’s on the ballot, and why it matters,” Al Jazeera, September 18, 2026, aljazeera.com; “Russian parliamentary elections: empty podiums, prizes for e-voting, no opposition,” CNN, September 18, 2026, cnn.com; “Russia holds parliamentary vote in areas it seized from Ukraine in the war,” Associated Press via The Washington Times, September 19, 2026, washingtontimes.com; “Why the Outcome of Russia’s Elections Is All But Assured,” TIME, September 18, 2026, time.com; “Russia’s State Duma election puts Putin’s economy to the test,” CNBC, September 17, 2026, cnbc.com. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 190, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus: On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 1, 1991), no. 46, vatican.va. ↩
- Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium, no. 191. ↩
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1901, vatican.va. ↩
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 93, a. 3, ad 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, in New Advent, newadvent.org; cited at Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1902. ↩
- Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 44. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, May 15, 2026), no. 192, vatican.va. ↩
- Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, nos. 216–217. ↩
Books Cited
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- Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Doubleday / Image, 2003)
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