Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Russia has just closed a three-day parliamentary election conducted heavily online, and one of the loudest warnings about how it was run comes from an unexpected corner.
Anastasia Kashevarova, one of Russia’s best-known pro-war “Z-bloggers,” told her Telegram audience on Sunday that a personal acquaintance was placed on the military registration rolls the day after casting an electronic ballot in the State Duma elections.
The notification arrived through Gosuslugi, Russia’s state services portal, and is not a summons to a recruitment office, Kashevarova stressed.
But she said the timing looked deliberately provocative in the middle of a national vote.
“This is not a summons, but the timing for sending out military registration notices was chosen in the most harmful way possible,” she wrote, as carried by the Russian outlet Echo.
She asked openly who inside the state apparatus had decided to signal to online voters, mid-election, that their data had just fed the draft rolls.
A second Moscow case
Kashevarova’s post did not stand alone. She cited the independent outlet Agentstvo, which reported that a Moscow resident who voted through Russia’s remote electronic voting system, known by its Russian acronym DEG, on Friday September 18 also received a Gosuslugi notice placing him on the military registry soon after.
Rights group OVD-Info, citing the election monitor Golos (“Fair Voting”), added that two election observers in Moscow received the same kind of notification on voting day, and that paper draft notices were handed out at polling stations in Novosibirsk and Yakutsk.
Whether the online voting data and the military registry entries are actually cross-linked is unconfirmed.
Infrastructure already in place
Russia’s parliamentary election ran September 18 to 20, with an unprecedented push into online voting through Gosuslugi.
By noon on the opening day, Moscow’s online turnout was roughly 100 times higher than in the 2021 State Duma vote, according to Meduza.
The same portal has been the backbone of Russia’s wartime draft system since Vladimir Putin signed a law in April 2023 overhauling conscription. Summonses issued through Gosuslugi are considered legally served seven days after being posted online, whether or not the recipient opens them.
Moscow was among four regions that moved to digital-only draft summonses for the fall 2025 conscription, The Moscow Times reported, a call-up of 135,000 men running from October 1 through December 31, 2025.
Russian election authorities and the Defense Ministry have not publicly commented on the reports.
