MEDUZA/EN/VHF

When releasing this week's voting results, Russia's Central Election Commission deliberately withheld statistical information from independent analysts, encoding the data published on its website to prevent researchers from downloading it automatically. The voting figures now available through the commission are "encrypted," meaning that any numbers copied from the website will appear as alphabetic code and randomized characters when pasted into external documents or spreadsheets. Statistician Sergey Shpilkin was one of the first analysts to draw attention to the election commission's "encoded" numbers. A graduate of Moscow State University's physics department and an elections analyst, Shpilkin has spent years downloading and studying data from the Central Election Commission in search of anomalies in Russia's turnout and voting results. Many political scientists and ordinary voters turn to his post-election graphs for objective assessments of falsifications in Russia. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke to Shpilkin to understand the arms race now underway between independent experts and Russia's election officials.

Russia was responsible for the poisoning and assassination of ex-FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled on Tuesday, September 21. Litvinenko fled Russia with his family and was granted asylum in the United Kingdom in 2001. He died of polonium poisoning in London in 2006. Ten years later, a public inquiry in the UK concluded that Litvinenko was murdered by two of his acquaintances: former Russian Secret Service officer Andrey Lugovoy -- who is now a State Duma lawmaker -- and businessman Dmitry Kovtun. Both the suspects, as well a the Russian authorities, have consistently denied any involvement in Litvinenko's killing.

During the 2020 Tomsk City Duma election, candidates endorsed by Team Navalny's "Smart Vote" initiative won unequivocally. Despite the fact that most of them were previously little-known, Smart Vote-backed candidates won 19 out of the 27 single-mandate constituencies, while candidates from the ruling party, United Russia, won 11 out of 37 seats in the Tomsk City Duma overall. For comparison, in the same electoral race in 2015, United Russia won in 25 constituencies and received 30 seats in the Duma. On the eve of the 2021 elections to the Tomsk City and Regional Dumas, Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev traveled to Tomsk to see how the results of last year's election changed the city's political situation. There, he discovered that the Communist Party had begun using bolder slogans and nominating younger candidates, while United Russia took a new approach, interacting more with voters and even venturing into social media. Meanwhile, the opposition candidates ultimately failed to coordinate on any joint action.

Voting is done in Russia's 2021 parliamentary races, and the results are now clear: United Russia maintained its supermajority, preserving its absolute control over the legislature; the Communist Party (KPRF) performed much better than it did five years ago; and the right-wing Liberal Democrats (LDPR) had one of their worst showings ever. Also, for the first time since Russia introduced party-list proportional representation, there will be a fifth faction: businessman Alexey Nechayev's New People (a group created with the Kremlin's help). As the dust settles, the biggest unresolved questions surround electronic voting -- specifically, how it affected results in and around Moscow, where online tallies catapulted the candidates endorsed by Mayor Sergey Sobyanin to victories against oppositionists who led in offline counts. Meduza's Andrey Pertsev examines what a weekend of voting says about the direction of Russia's legislative politics.

Attention: These observations are based on preliminary results. A lot could still change.

Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza is taking the Russian Investigative Committee to court for allegedly failing to investigate two apparent attempts on his life.

In a message on Friday evening, Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced that the popular instant messenger is suspending support for all "bots associated with election campaigning" during Russia's parliamentary elections, which began today and conclude on Sunday, September 19.

After bowing to censorship demands a day earlier by disabling Russian users' access to Alexey Navalny's mobile app on its app store, Google has ordered Navalny's associates to delete two documents now available on Google Docs that contain lists of election candidates endorsed by Smart Vote, the team's strategic voting initiative meant to consolidate opposition against the political party United Russia. According to a letter shared by Team Navalny on its Telegram channel, Google says the content is illegal in Russia because the URLs to these documents now appear on the federal government's registry of banned resources.

Notoriously uncomfortable with personal computers, President Vladimir Putin voted online on September 17, casting his ballot remotely while in self-isolation, following exposure to COVID-infected colleagues. Footage of Putin voting shows him entering his office and sitting down at a computer where the Web browser is already opened to Russia's electronic voting system. Using a single finger, the Russian president then enters something on the keyboard and the screen flashes the following message: "Thank you. Your vote has been counted." Meduza explains what's wrong with this demonstration.

Just a few weeks ago, Russia's federal censor blocked the website for Alexey Navalny's voting initiative "Smart Vote." On September 15, Navalny's team went ahead and released their list of recommended candidates regardless, uploading it to a Google Doc. Later that evening, Google Docs became temporarily unavailable inside Russia. On the first day of voting in the State Duma elections, September 17, tech giants Apple and Google caved to pressure from the Russian authorities and pulled Navalny's mobile app from the App Store and Google Play. What's more, Apple disabled its new "Private Relay" feature for users inside Russia. To find out more about whether or not Apple and Google had a choice in these matters -- and what this means for the future of the RuNet -- Meduza spoke to lawyer Sarkis Darbinyan from the digital rights group Roskomsvoboda.