Cancel the elections? The siloviki have a simple fix for United Russia’s polling problem.
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Russia’s security and law-enforcement elite (the siloviki) are reportedly pressing Vladimir Putin to postpone September’s State Duma elections — in practice, to cancel them. The idea has gained ground since Ukrainian drones began pummeling Moscow this month. The push comes from the Federal Security Service’s leadership and Viktor Zolotov, head of the Rosgvardiya national guard and Putin’s longtime friend and former bodyguard, according to three people who spoke to Meduza’s Andrey Pertsev: two close to the presidential administration and a political strategist who works with the Kremlin and regional governments. Most government officials still expect the vote to go ahead, the sources say, though the outcome isn’t yet settled.
The siloviki’s case
Talk of postponement surfaced this spring. The siloviki point to a worsening economy: budget strain, rising prices, layoffs, and the gasoline shortages now spreading across the country. The country’s ruling political party, United Russia, is polling near 35 percent in surveys conducted by the state-linked firms FOM and VTsIOM, and lower still in the closed measurements run by the Federal Protective Service, on which the siloviki themselves rely. While officials have been reluctant to set goals ahead of the September elections, the party is always expected to come close to 50 percent — a mark that economic strain, the fuel crisis, and war fatigue now put out of easy reach.
Meduza’s sources say the siloviki advocate blunt policymaking in the face of wartime uncertainty and embrace the apocryphal Stalin line: “no person, no problem.” This is reportedly the reasoning behind two of the regime’s most controversial recent moves: the suspensions of mobile internet access that cut off Russians from independent media and the migration crackdown that followed the 2024 Crocus City Hall terrorist attack outside Moscow.
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Russia’s election defenders
For two of the Kremlin’s most powerful deputy chiefs of staff — Sergey Kiriyenko, who runs its domestic-politics bloc, and Alexey Gromov, his counterpart overseeing the country’s mass media — federal elections are their chance to show their worth to the Putin regime. If the president were to suspend the September vote, these blocs would lose the very thing that justifies their place in the administration.
For Dmitry Medvedev, the former president now serving as deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, the fall campaign is a path to heading the United Russia list — which eluded him last time — and, with it, a claim on the Duma speaker’s chair.
Kiriyenko and Gromov succeeded once already this spring in convincing Putin to hold the fall elections despite the war, though they failed to head off the internet crackdown the siloviki wanted. Putin leans the same way. He treats the vote as self-validating, one administration source says — “in Ukraine there are no elections, but we have them” — and views cancellation as conceding that the Kremlin’s plan has been disrupted and the situation has become an emergency.
At the start of the full-scale invasion, Kiriyenko reportedly talked Putin out of the siloviki’s push to scrap that year’s gubernatorial races. Calling off a vote, Kiriyenko argued, signals that the authorities are afraid of the results.
If Putin decides to postpone the elections
Russia has multiple legal routes for suspending elections, including martial law, a state of emergency, or even a lesser “heightened-readiness” regime, says Andrey Buzin, a specialist in electoral law. Voting could be stopped without even declaring special conditions nationwide — a handful of regions would be enough.
However, Russia’s Central Election Commission has already set the vote for September 18–20, 2026, which one administration source calls the “baseline scenario” and “a win for the civilian officials.” “Canceling or postponing it once the [date] is set is already more difficult,” he says, adding that talk of calling off the September elections remains “only at the level of conversations,” with nothing “sitting on the president’s desk.”
The strategist says holding the elections on time will be a “symbolic moment,” and argues that Putin’s criticism of the absence of elections in wartime Ukraine rules out any delay.
Even so, talk of postponement has grown sharply since Ukrainian drones began reaching Moscow, two sources say. The strategist tells Meduza: “It’s a total mess everywhere you look. If it were up to me in these conditions, I’d postpone or just cancel it.”
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