Ukraine Drones Make Orchestrating Russia’s Elections Tougher

Kremlin-orchestrated voting in the Russian Black Sea resort city of Sochi on Friday was halted, and voters and officials were ordered to head underground or into concrete bunkers following a regional alert warning of possible Ukrainian drone strikes. Sochi Mayor Andrey Proshunin, in a statement published on his official Telegram channel, ordered election commission members, observers, and voters present at the polling stations to move to shelters and stay there until an all-clear, before ballot-casting might continue.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. “Please observe safety precautions; the threat is currently being countered. Polling stations will resume operations as soon as it is safe to do so,” Proshunin said. Air defenses were tracking and attempting to engage Ukrainian drones operating in regional airspace, and all citizens should remain calm, he said. According to unconfirmed reports in local media, on Friday at least one Ukrainian drone struck and damaged a Sochi voting site, blowing out windows and breaking up fixtures and furniture inside a public building. Authorities moved the polling station “to a reserve site,” and ballot-casting would continue once polling sites re-opened, Ella Pamfilova, Chairperson of the Central Election Commission, said in a briefing as reported by the news platform BFM.RU. Russian national elections taking place between Sept. 18-20 will select representatives for all 450 seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. Regional governors and legislature members will also be determined by around 111 million eligible voters. Other Topics of Interest Slovakia’s Fico Pours Cold Water on Fulfilling NATO’s Article 5 Mutual Defense Slovakia’s prime minister said he would seek to prevent his country from entering a military conflict under NATO’s collective-defense clause, questioning why Slovak soldiers should be sent to fight. On Wednesday, on the eve of polls’ opening, a Ukrainian drone struck and killed Elena Astanina, a Ukrainian citizen collaborating with Russian occupation authorities in the Ukrainian city of Tokmak in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, pro-Russia news sites reported. Astanina had served as a Russian election council member since 2022 and was attacked by a drone while helping prepare a voting site, the news magazine Zhivaya Kuban reported. The independent Russian news agency SOTA, and later Kremlin state media TASS, confirmed the strike and Astanina’s death. A statement from Zaporizhzhia region occupation authority chief Sergei Obertas praised Astanina as a Russian patriot and said the state would assist her family. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Thursday said that Ukraine was launching drone strikes with the intent of undermining “democratic elections” in her country, and spun the Ukrainian strike on Astanina as a terrorist attack against a peaceful Russian citizen. In occupied districts of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, voting was proceeding as planned on Friday, according to Ukrainian news agencies, but officials were using paper records to conduct voting and track ballots after Ukrainian drone strikes targeting electric transformers in the region cut off power. A statement from the Russia-run local power utility Khersonenergo confirmed the loss of electricity deliveries to some 150,000 customers, but blamed the outage on “a technical problem.” Russia’s defense ministry on Friday morning claimed its forces had shot down 629 Ukrainian drones in Russian airspace, making the night’s raids by shootdown claims one of the four or five most massive drone attacks of the entire Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukrainian military sources and independent media said that the night’s attacks targeted port facilities in the city of Taganrog on the Azov Sea, and a nearby military airfield in Rostov-on-Don. Both air raids were follow-up attacks, with dozens of Ukrainian aircraft having hit and damaged a Taganrog aerospace factory and megawarehouse on Tuesday, and a power substation and military airfield near Rostov on Thursday. Some Ukrainian drone sorties have reached 3,000 km (1,250 miles) deep into Russia, with massed drone attacks usually targeting Russian Federation military- or energy-linked infrastructure. Although initially scoffed at by authorities as pinpricks mighty Russia might ignore, actual or threatened Ukrainian drone attacks are now taken more seriously by local officials. On the first day of national elections, which the Kremlin traditionally has used to pump up patriotism and state-manage an image of a stable and prosperous Russia under President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, Russia’s Central Election Commission published instructions to election officials about what to do if Ukrainian kamikaze aircraft seemed en route and potentially able to disrupt the voting process, a major Russian daily reported. Officials at a voting site forced to shut down because of a potential or actual Ukrainian drone attack should turn over voter registers, voting boxes, and ballots to the election site boss for storage in a safe, while police and emergency response officials would supervise the orderly evacuation of the voting site, official step-by-step procedures at a voting site in the Volga region city of Kazan mandated, according to a Friday BiznesOnline report. A policeman stationed by the safe until an all-clear was called would ensure a fair poll without fraud, the article says. Although more than 1,200 km (750 miles) from probable Ukrainian launch sites, industrial sites in Kazan have been regularly hit by Ukrainian drones for more than a year. Probably the most frequently attacked facility has been the Nizhnekamsk oil refinery, which Ukrainian drones have hit at least seven times since November 2025, Kyiv Post’s records show. United Russia, the ruling party backed by Putin, is widely expected to retain its dominant position and supermajority thanks to state-controlled media and state repression of opposition parties. Sochi, with a permanent population of over 500,000 that rises to more than 3 million during the high season, is Russia’s wealthiest and most exclusive beach resort. Putin’s luxurious 40-hectare Bocharov Ruchei summer home, with a helipad, yacht mooring, tennis courts, orchards and fresh and seawater swimming pools, sits in Sochi’s elite northern district. Ukraine, since launching a long-range drone bombardment of Russia in mid-2025, has hit port, oil refining and fuel storage structures around greater Sochi at least 10 times, but never attacked Putin’s residence, Kyiv Post’s strike records show. The most recent confirmed Ukrainian attack in Sochi’s vicinity took place on Sept. 14, with at least four drones destroying an advanced Russian S-400 air defense system deployed to protect the city and Bocharev Ruchei from Ukrainian air strikes, those records show.