Russia has begun holding parliamentary elections inside Ukrainian territory it illegally annexed after launching its full-scale invasion more than four and a half years ago, the first time Moscow has organized such a vote in these occupied regions. The exercise, staged across parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, is widely viewed by Ukrainian officials and Western governments as an attempt to manufacture political legitimacy for territory seized by force.

Neither Ukraine nor the vast majority of the international community recognizes Russia's 2022 annexation of these four regions, which followed hastily arranged referendums that international observers dismissed as coerced and fraudulent. By holding parliamentary elections there now, the Kremlin appears determined to normalize its rule and signal that the occupation is permanent, regardless of the war's eventual outcome on the battlefield or at the negotiating table.

A Legal Fiction With Real Consequences

Under international law, the annexations are void. The United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned Russia's 2022 land grab, and most countries continue to regard Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as sovereign Ukrainian territory under illegal foreign occupation. Holding elections there does nothing to change that legal status; ballots cast under military occupation, in regions where much of the pre-war population has fled and where independent monitoring is impossible, carry no standing under the frameworks that govern territorial sovereignty.

Yet the political effect inside Russia may be exactly what the Kremlin intends. By seating deputies from these regions in Russia's parliament, the Duma, Moscow is attempting to weave the occupied territories into the ordinary machinery of the Russian state: taxation, representation, administration. Analysts who study Russian governance say this is a continuation of a pattern in which formal democratic procedures are used to launder territorial and political outcomes decided well in advance.

The vote does not confer legitimacy on the annexation, but it does make the occupation harder to unwind administratively, entangling local governance, courts and property records with the Russian state.

Echoes of a Familiar Playbook

The move fits a broader pattern in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where elections have long served to ratify decisions already made rather than to offer voters genuine choice. Domestically, Putin has overseen a system of what he has called "managed democracy," a term he has used to justify tightly controlled elections that nonetheless preserve the outward appearance of pluralism. In the 2011 Duma elections, for instance, Putin's United Russia party saw its share of the vote fall sharply amid accusations of fraud, triggering the largest protests of his rule. He answered with a decisive presidential victory in 2012 and, over the following decade, steadily tightened control over the media, opposition parties and electoral administration.

That same machinery is now being extended into occupied Ukraine. Just as Russia previously created loyalist political parties at home to dilute opposition and manufacture parliamentary majorities, it has installed Moscow-backed administrations in the annexed regions to organize and oversee these elections. Ukrainian officials say residents who refuse to participate face intimidation, while many of the regions' original inhabitants have been displaced by the fighting or have fled Russian rule altogether, leaving voter rolls that bear little resemblance to the population that lived there before 2022.

Political Stakes for Kyiv and the West

For Ukraine, the elections represent more than a symbolic affront. President Volodymyr Zelensky's government has repeatedly warned that any move toward normalizing the occupation, however incremental, risks complicating future negotiations over territorial withdrawal. Kyiv has insisted that a full Russian pullback from all annexed territory remains a precondition for any lasting peace settlement, a position that Moscow's continued institution-building in these regions is designed to make progressively harder to achieve.

For Western governments, the vote poses a diplomatic test. Most have declared the annexations illegitimate and are unlikely to recognize the resulting parliamentary seats, but the elections nonetheless mark a further step in the de facto integration of the territories into the Russian state, mirroring the trajectory that unfolded in Crimea after its 2014 annexation. There, Russia gradually replaced local governance structures, currency and legal codes with its own, entrenching a status quo that persists more than a decade later despite the peninsula's continued nonrecognition as Russian territory by most of the world.

Whether the newly elected deputies from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson will have any genuine influence within Russia's parliament is uncertain. What is clearer is the message the vote is meant to send: that Moscow considers these lands a permanent part of Russia, and that time, occupation and bureaucratic entrenchment are now working against any negotiated return of the territory to Ukrainian control.