MOSCOW, Russia (AFP) – Russian voters began casting their ballots late Saturday in a parliamentary poll set to maintain the dominance of parties loyal to President Vladimir Putin, with voting stations opening in the country’s far east.

“I really want people to come vote, to believe in elections,” electoral commission president Ella Pamfilova said on live public television.

“We will be watching the entirety of the voting process in our huge country,” she added as polls opened on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia’s most easterly region at 2000 GMT.

In a country of several different time zones, most of Russia’s 110 million voters will cast their ballots starting from 0500 GMT on Sunday morning, including in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

The last polling stations will close in Russia’s European enclave Kaliningrad at 1800 GMT on Sunday, with the first exit polls expected shortly afterwards.

For the first time residents on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, are among the voters eligible to cast their ballots for the 450-seat Duma, stirring fury from Ukraine.

The nationwide elections, which also sees regional leaders elected in some areas, follow years of tumult that have seen the country lurch into its worst stand-off with the West since the Cold War, plunge into economic crisis and launch a military campaign in Syria.

But Putin’s ratings remain high at around 80 per cent and, with the Kremlin in tight control of the media and public discourse, authorities appear to be banking on a trouble-free vote paving the way for him to cruise to a fourth term as president at polls in 2018.

Voters will also decide this weekend whether to maintain Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, previously appointed directly by Putin.

But rights groups say all criticism of the Kremlin-loyal strongman has been stamped out ruthlessly ahead of the first electoral test for his decade of iron-fisted rule.