Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on Sunday (17 March) expectedly secured six more years in power, though thousands of opponents staged a symbolic noon protest at polling stations.
Exit polls indicated a landslide victory for Putin in Russia’s presidential election which had only one possible result.
With a quarter of ballots counted, the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre said 87.97% of people voted for the incumbent, while pollster FOM showed Putin won 87.8%.
Three days of voting were due to conclude in Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad region at 9 PM Moscow time, with results of exit polling likely to be published shortly after.
In Sunday’s staged election, Putin was standing against three candidates from parties who have not criticised his rule nor his invasion of Ukraine.
While Putin’s victory was never in doubt, early results indicate this result, is likely to be the biggest share of the vote he has claimed in any of his five presidential election wins, since his first in 2000.
Putin, who rose to power in 1999, won a new six-year term enabling him to overtake Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and becoming Russia’s longest-serving leader for more than 200 years.
An official celebration is scheduled for Monday.
‘Noon against Putin’ protest
Several hours before polls were due to close, at 1800 GMT, national turnout surpassed 2018 levels of 67.5%.
The head of the Kremlin’s human rights council, Valery Fadeyev, said police should investigate people who spoiled ballot papers because they were “controlled from abroad,” the state-run TASS news service reported.
Supporters of Putin’s most prominent opponent Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, called on Russians to come out for a ‘Noon against Putin’ protest, to show their dissent against a leader they cast as a corrupt autocrat.
Thousands did protest at polling stations, though Russian exile media stressed there were few outward signs to distinguish them from ordinary voters.
There was no independent tally of how many of Russia’s 114 million voters took part in opposition demonstrations, amid extremely tight security involving tens of thousands of police and security officials.
In addition, across Asia and Europe, crowds gathered at polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions. Navalny’s widow, Yulia, appeared at the Russian embassy in Berlin.
Exiled Navalny supporters posted photos and broadcast footage on YouTube, of protests inside Russia and abroad.
War hangs over polls
The election comes just over two years since Putin triggered the deadliest European conflict since World War Two by ordering the invasion of Ukraine.
Putin dismissed prospects for a halt to the war in a televised interview on Wednesday (13 March), saying he’s not interested in a “pause” that would allow Ukraine to re-arm with the help of Western allies.
War has hung over the three-day election: Ukraine has repeatedly attacked oil refineries in Russia, shelled Russian regions, and sought to pierce Russian borders with proxy forces – a move Putin said would not be left unpunished.
The Russian Defense Ministry said it repelled 35 drone attacks in eight regions overnight, including around Moscow.
Early voting had begun last week in the occupied parts of four Ukrainian regions: Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk, with Ukrainians under occupation having been pressured by a pro-vote campaign called InformUIK, whose members visited prospective voters at home, often under gunpoint.
Ahead of the polls, Ukraine’s government has called on citizens living in Russian-occupied territories to turn their backs on what they call Moscow’s pseudo-elections.
“There is no legitimacy in this imitation of elections and there cannot be. This person should be on trial in The Hague. That’s what we need to ensure,” said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his nightly video address.
[Edited by Rajnish Singh]
