Russia's ruling United Russia party was on track to easily win a parliamentary election that President Vladimir Putin has cast as a test of support for the war in Ukraine, partial official results showed on Sunday, after Ukraine launched a massive drone attack on the Russian capital.

Initial results showed United Russia comfortably ahead with 57.5 percent of the vote. Other parties like the Communists, the ultra-nationalist LDPR, the New People party and the Just Russia party trailed by a huge margin but were on course to win seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council and a former president, said United Russia had performed with dignity, a result he said showed that Russians had entrusted it to govern further.

Russian government officials accused Ukraine of trying to disrupt the State Duma vote – the first since Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022 – after Kyiv launched hundreds of drones at Moscow and other regions in what the TASS state news agency said was the biggest attack of its kind since the war began.

The drone strikes killed three people in the Moscow region and two more in the Russian-held part of Ukraine's Kherson region, including an election official, according to the region's governor and the election commission.

A facility at Moscow's oil refinery, which has been targeted before, was also damaged. As voting got underway in the capital, flames and huge columns of smoke rose from the site on its outskirts.

"The biggest attack by enemy drones has been repelled," Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram.

"This unprecedented attack was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections. The enemy did not succeed."

Russia's Defence Ministry said Ukraine had also fired Flamingo cruise missiles and said it had downed nearly 2,000 Ukrainian drones targeting various regions and 8 cruise missiles in the last 24 hours. It said it would intensify its own strikes on Ukrainian military targets in response.

"In response to the Kyiv regime's attacks on civilian targets within Russia, the Russian army will continue and intensify its high-accuracy strikes against military targets in Kyiv," the ministry said.

Voting systems also faced waves of cyber attacks, according to election authorities, who said that the electoral process had nonetheless been mostly smooth.

Central Election Commission Chairwoman (CEC) Ella Pamfilova said the latest attacks had not deterred voters. "The more pressure they put on us, the more we are seeing an unprecedented level of what I would call public unity," RIA news agency quoted her as saying.

Turnout had reached nearly 57 percent as of early evening Moscow time, CEC data showed.

Most anti-war candidates have been barred from the ballot. Those who did run from the liberal Yabloko party, which has polled in the single digits in recent years but hoped to tap into war fatigue, said they feared for their freedom after courts handed long jail terms to two senior party figures before the vote for comments about the conflict.

Kyiv, which has suspended elections under martial law, has dismissed the Russian vote as a "pseudo election". (Reuters/AFP)



Edited by Cecil Wong