Ukrainian Drone Strikes Disrupt First Day of Voting in Southern Russia

Ukrainian drone strikes disrupted the work of election officials at polling stations in southern Russia and parts of occupied Ukraine on Friday, Russian authorities said, the first day of a three-day voting period for parliamentary and regional races.

Ella Pamfilova, head of Russia's Central Election Commission, told reporters at a morning press conference that there were small incidents she could not fail to mention. In the Krasnodar region, one polling station had to be moved to an alternative location because its windows were broken by drone damage. Fourteen polling stations in the occupied Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine briefly lost power after drones damaged energy infrastructure, she said, though the sites eventually switched to backup supplies.

Andrei Proshunin, the mayor of the southern resort city of Sochi, said election workers and voters were forced to seek shelter on Friday morning during an air raid alert. He did not say whether additional safety measures had been introduced across the city's more than 240 polling stations amid near-daily drone attacks.

Russia is holding elections to the lower-house State Duma for the first time since President Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Alongside the parliamentary races, gubernatorial elections and votes for local legislative assemblies are taking place in several regions. Earlier this week, the Central Election Commission said one of its members was killed in a drone attack in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region. Voting is also under way in parts of occupied Ukraine, which Russia claims to have annexed in September 2022.

Russian election officials also reported cyberattacks on the country's remote electronic voting system, with the head of Moscow's election commission assuring that an army of IT specialists was working around the clock to repel the intrusions. On the eve of the first election day, Pamfilova warned of mobile internet disruptions across Russia, a common tactic used by the Russian military to disrupt the guidance systems of drones. For us, she said, this is no reason to cancel the vote. The independent news outlets RusNews and Sotavision, citing election observers in Moscow, reported widespread failures of electronic voting terminals, claims The Moscow Times could not independently verify.

Despite the anti-drone measures, Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, reported more than 350 incoming Ukrainian drones between Thursday night and Friday morning, claiming that at least 64 were destroyed on their approach to the capital. Russia's Defence Ministry said it intercepted 629 Ukrainian drones overnight across Russia and annexed Crimea.

In Ukraine, authorities said two people were killed when the Russian military struck a business in the north-western Zhytomyr region. Separate attacks wounded multiple people near Kyiv and elsewhere in the country, with authorities reporting damage to infrastructure, schools, clinics and residential buildings.