President Vladimir Putin achieved a landslide record in Sunday’s Russian election, consolidating his power. However, thousands of opponents staged a protest at polling stations at midday, and the US said the vote was neither free nor fair.
For Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel who came to power in 1999, the result is intended to underline to the West that its leaders will have to deal with an emboldened Russia, both in war and peace, for many more years to come.
The first result means Putin, 71, will quickly secure a new six-year term that would allow him to overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia’s longest-serving leader for more than 200 years.
According to an exit poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM), Putin won 87.8% of the vote, the highest result in Russia’s post-Soviet history. The Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VCIOM) puts Putin at 87%. The first official results indicated that the polls were accurate.
“The elections are obviously neither free nor fair, given that Putin has imprisoned political opponents and prevented others from running against him,” the White House National Security Council spokesperson said.
The election comes just over two years after Putin triggered the deadliest European conflict since World War II by ordering an invasion of Ukraine. He calls it a “special military operation.”
War loomed over the three-day election: Ukraine repeatedly attacked oil refineries in Russia, bombed Russian regions and tried to breach Russian borders with proxy forces – a move Putin said would not go unpunished .
Although Putin’s re-election is not in doubt, given his control over Russia and the absence of real challengers, the former KGB spy wanted to demonstrate that he has the overwhelming support of the Russians. Several hours before polls closed at 6pm GMT, nationwide voter turnout surpassed 2018 levels by 67.5%.
Supporters of Putin’s most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, had called on Russians to demonstrate “Noon against Putin” to show their dissent against a leader they considered a corrupt autocrat.
There has been no independent count of how many of Russia’s 114 million voters took part in the opposition rallies, which took place amid high security involving tens of thousands of police and security officials.
Reuters journalists noted an increased flow of voters, especially young people, at midday at polling stations in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with queues of several hundred or even thousands of people.
Some said they were protesting, even though there were few outward signs that distinguished them from ordinary voters.
As midday arrived across Asia and Europe, hundreds of people gathered at polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions. Navalny’s widow, Yulia, appeared at the Russian embassy in Berlin to cheers and chants of “Yulia, Yulia.”
Navalny’s supporters in exile broadcast footage of protests in Russia and abroad on YouTube.
“People saw that she wasn’t alone”
“We have proven to ourselves, to all of Russia and to the whole world that Putin is not Russia, that Putin has seized power in Russia,” said Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated loneliness: many people saw that they were not alone.”
Leonid Volkov, an exiled Navalny aide who was attacked with a hammer last week in Vilnius, estimates that hundreds of thousands of people turned out to polling stations in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities.
At least 74 people were arrested across Russia on Sunday, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors the crackdown on dissent.
In the previous two days there had been scattered incidents of protest when some Russians set fire to voting booths or poured green dye into ballot boxes. Russian officials called them scoundrels and traitors. Opponents published some photos of spoiled ballots with slogans insulting Putin.
But Navalny’s death has left the opposition bereft of its most formidable leader, and other top opposition figures are abroad, in prison or dead.
The West considers Putin an autocrat and a murderer. US President Joe Biden last month dubbed him a “crazy son of a bitch”. The International Criminal Court in The Hague indicted him for the alleged war crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children, which the Kremlin denies.
Putin sees the war as part of an age-old battle with a declining and decadent West that he says humiliated post-Cold War Russia by encroaching on Moscow’s sphere of influence.
“Putin’s task now is to indelibly imprint his worldview in the minds of the Russian political establishment” to secure a like-minded successor, Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. project.
“For an American administration that hoped that Putin’s adventure in Ukraine would now end with a decisive setback for Moscow’s interests, the election is a reminder that Putin expects there will be many more rounds in the geopolitical ring.”
Russia’s election comes at what Western spy chiefs call a crossroads for the war in Ukraine and the West generally, in what Biden calls a 21st-century struggle between democracies and autocracies.
Support for Ukraine is entangled in U.S. domestic politics ahead of November’s presidential election, which pits Biden against his predecessor, Donald Trump. Trump’s Republican Party in Congress has blocked military aid to Kiev.
Although Kiev regained territory after the 2022 invasion, Russian forces have recently gained ground following last year’s failed Ukrainian counteroffensive.
The Biden administration fears that Putin could seize a bigger chunk of Ukraine unless Kiev gets more support soon. CIA Director William Burns said this could embolden China.
Putin says the West is engaged in a hybrid war against Russia and that Western intelligence and Ukraine are trying to disrupt the elections.
Voting also took place in Crimea, which Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014, and in four other Ukrainian regions that it partly controls and claims since 2022. Kiev considers elections in the occupied territories illegal and null and void.