The Borderline Drawn by the Budget
In this section's investigation, the discussion went one step further into the question of occupied territory administration. What happens to the administration of occupied territories? The investigation returned not election figures but a budget table. This is the core of this section.
First, the established facts must be laid out. Russia's 2026 9th State Duma election was held over three days from September 18 to 20, and with 99.9 percent of votes counted, United Russia won 57.83 percent in the proportional representation vote, securing 355 seats. This surpasses the 49.8 percent and 324 seats of 2021, making it the largest ever. It crossed the 300-seat constitutional amendment blocking threshold, exceeding two-thirds. Final certification has not yet been issued. But more important than these numbers is the fact that occupied territory districts were mixed into those 355 seats. Donetsk 3, Luhansk 2, Zaporizhzhia 1, Kherson 1, Crimea and Sevastopol 4—a total of 11 single-mandate districts were newly allocated. And these district boundaries do not follow the land Russia actually controls. Kholiivka District No. 15 includes Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, and Lyman. These are cities Russian troops cannot physically enter. Russian elections were not held there. Yet they were included in the district. This is not an administrative error. It is the work of pinning the entire territorial claim within the Russian federal legal system through the administrative act of district formation. It is not counting votes but registering land by law.
The real structure the investigation revealed is here. The federal budget Russia has poured into the occupied territories is enormous, but 59 to 76 percent of the occupied territories' own budgets are being filled by transfers from the Russian central government. Donetsk is 60 percent, Luhansk 59 percent, Kherson 72 percent, Zaporizhzhia 60 percent. For the New Territories under State Program No. 60 alone, 298.4 billion rubles were allocated for 2026, and free transfers from other budgets into the own finances of the four occupied territories amounted to 344 billion rubles in 2025 alone. This is at a level where the amount received by Donetsk alone is larger than the entire budget of Belgorod Oblast. Eighty-two Russian regions are acting as patrons for these occupied territories, and many of those regions carry their own fiscal deficits. Therefore, the meaning of the election results must be inverted. The figure of 80 percent turnout is not a measurement of the residents' will but a dependent variable of this fiscal dependency structure. Those areas cannot live on their own money. If the central government does not supply it, administration, pensions, and medical care all stop. So no matter who is elected, Moscow makes the decisions. Turnout is not the cause but the result.
And at the point where these two dimensions meet, there is the unification question. The administrative heads of the occupied territories are not people elected through elections. Since the 2022 annexation, not a single gubernatorial election under Russian federal law has been held in those four places. All are appointed positions. In the Donetsk government, the proportion of officials from mainland Russia jumped from 13 percent in 2014 to 48 percent in 2026, and in Luhansk it went from 3 percent to 35 percent. In other words, these areas are being reorganized not as autonomous units with resident representation but as administrative zones where Moscow plants personnel and supplies finances. This point reveals exactly the same structure as the Korean Peninsula issue. Our definition that division is not an inherent contradiction but a product of external imposition here gains material evidence. Without any procedure for the people of the land to determine their own fate, borders are drawn by external power's budgets, appointments, and district formation. Ukraine's Central Election Commission, by Resolution No. 70, declared these results and appointment certificates legally void, and established the logic that the moment occupied territory districts are counted in seat allocation, the representativeness of the entire Duma itself is undermined. Translating this logic into the language of our line, it is this: a borderline drawn without the consent of the residents of occupied territories cannot create sovereignty, and an administration maintained by violence and finance cannot create legitimacy.
The other works in this section were also on the same axis. The international situation reports that came into this section are used only as material for fact-checking. No matter how specific a claim about domestic politics is, it is an object of verification, not an authority. And in this section's investigation, I reconfirmed the coordinates of the southern side of the Korean Peninsula. The Russian Duma election is one scene in the world situation, and the lesson that scene gives us is methodological. If one does not look together at the work of registering territory by law and the fiscal structure that supports that law, one misses the substance of power. The southern side's 800 trillion semiconductor plan, the tariff negotiations with the United States, and the nuclear submarine approval must be read in the same way. If you ask where the decision-making authority lies and who pays the cost, the chain is revealed. Just as the occupied territory election is territory registration disguised as turnout, the southern side's industrial policy is also a reorganization of dependency disguised as growth. What we must ask is not which country a piece of land belongs to, but when the people living on that land will regain the authority to determine their own fate.
First, the established facts must be laid out. Russia's 2026 9th State Duma election was held over three days from September 18 to 20, and with 99.9 percent of votes counted, United Russia won 57.83 percent in the proportional representation vote, securing 355 seats. This surpasses the 49.8 percent and 324 seats of 2021, making it the largest ever. It crossed the 300-seat constitutional amendment blocking threshold, exceeding two-thirds. Final certification has not yet been issued. But more important than these numbers is the fact that occupied territory districts were mixed into those 355 seats. Donetsk 3, Luhansk 2, Zaporizhzhia 1, Kherson 1, Crimea and Sevastopol 4—a total of 11 single-mandate districts were newly allocated. And these district boundaries do not follow the land Russia actually controls. Kholiivka District No. 15 includes Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, and Lyman. These are cities Russian troops cannot physically enter. Russian elections were not held there. Yet they were included in the district. This is not an administrative error. It is the work of pinning the entire territorial claim within the Russian federal legal system through the administrative act of district formation. It is not counting votes but registering land by law.
The real structure the investigation revealed is here. The federal budget Russia has poured into the occupied territories is enormous, but 59 to 76 percent of the occupied territories' own budgets are being filled by transfers from the Russian central government. Donetsk is 60 percent, Luhansk 59 percent, Kherson 72 percent, Zaporizhzhia 60 percent. For the New Territories under State Program No. 60 alone, 298.4 billion rubles were allocated for 2026, and free transfers from other budgets into the own finances of the four occupied territories amounted to 344 billion rubles in 2025 alone. This is at a level where the amount received by Donetsk alone is larger than the entire budget of Belgorod Oblast. Eighty-two Russian regions are acting as patrons for these occupied territories, and many of those regions carry their own fiscal deficits. Therefore, the meaning of the election results must be inverted. The figure of 80 percent turnout is not a measurement of the residents' will but a dependent variable of this fiscal dependency structure. Those areas cannot live on their own money. If the central government does not supply it, administration, pensions, and medical care all stop. So no matter who is elected, Moscow makes the decisions. Turnout is not the cause but the result.
And at the point where these two dimensions meet, there is the unification question. The administrative heads of the occupied territories are not people elected through elections. Since the 2022 annexation, not a single gubernatorial election under Russian federal law has been held in those four places. All are appointed positions. In the Donetsk government, the proportion of officials from mainland Russia jumped from 13 percent in 2014 to 48 percent in 2026, and in Luhansk it went from 3 percent to 35 percent. In other words, these areas are being reorganized not as autonomous units with resident representation but as administrative zones where Moscow plants personnel and supplies finances. This point reveals exactly the same structure as the Korean Peninsula issue. Our definition that division is not an inherent contradiction but a product of external imposition here gains material evidence. Without any procedure for the people of the land to determine their own fate, borders are drawn by external power's budgets, appointments, and district formation. Ukraine's Central Election Commission, by Resolution No. 70, declared these results and appointment certificates legally void, and established the logic that the moment occupied territory districts are counted in seat allocation, the representativeness of the entire Duma itself is undermined. Translating this logic into the language of our line, it is this: a borderline drawn without the consent of the residents of occupied territories cannot create sovereignty, and an administration maintained by violence and finance cannot create legitimacy.
The other works in this section were also on the same axis. The international situation reports that came into this section are used only as material for fact-checking. No matter how specific a claim about domestic politics is, it is an object of verification, not an authority. And in this section's investigation, I reconfirmed the coordinates of the southern side of the Korean Peninsula. The Russian Duma election is one scene in the world situation, and the lesson that scene gives us is methodological. If one does not look together at the work of registering territory by law and the fiscal structure that supports that law, one misses the substance of power. The southern side's 800 trillion semiconductor plan, the tariff negotiations with the United States, and the nuclear submarine approval must be read in the same way. If you ask where the decision-making authority lies and who pays the cost, the chain is revealed. Just as the occupied territory election is territory registration disguised as turnout, the southern side's industrial policy is also a reorganization of dependency disguised as growth. What we must ask is not which country a piece of land belongs to, but when the people living on that land will regain the authority to determine their own fate.