Russian President Vladimir Putin on screen during a gathering together with his confidants ahead of the 2024 elections in Gostiny Dvor in Moscow, Russia, January 31, 2024.
Maksym Shemetov | Reuters
President Vladimir Putin is poised to tighten his grip on Sunday in Russian elections that can hand him a landslide victory. However, thousands of opponents staged a symbolic protest at noon on the polling stations.
Putin, who got here to power in 1999, is about to achieve a brand new six-year term that can enable him to overtake Joseph Stalin to change into Russia’s longest-serving leader in greater than 200 years.
The election comes just over two years since Putin sparked Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II by ordering an invasion of Ukraine. He describes it as a “special military operation.”
War hung over the three-day election: Ukraine has repeatedly attacked Russia’s oil refineries, shelled Russian regions and tried to interrupt through Russian borders with proxy forces – a move Putin says won’t go unpunished.
Although Putin’s re-election is beyond doubt given his control over Russia and lack of real rivals, the previous KGB spy wants to point out that he has the overwhelming support of Russians. Hours before polls closed at 6:00 p.m. GMT, nationwide turnout exceeded the 2018 level of 67.5%.
Supporters of Putin’s most outstanding opponent, Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, called on Russians to return to the “South against Putin” protest to specific their opposition to the leader they see as a corrupt autocrat.
There isn’t any independent data on how a lot of Russia’s 114 million voters took part in the opposition demonstrations, which took place amid extremely tight security and involved tens of thousands of police and security officers.
Reuters journalists recorded a rise in the inflow of voters, especially young ones, at noon to polling stations in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with queues of several hundred and even thousands of individuals.
Some claimed to be protesting, although there have been few outward signs distinguishing them from bizarre voters.
As noon got here in Asia and Europe, a whole bunch of individuals gathered at polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions. Navalny’s widow, Julia, appeared on the Russian embassy in Berlin to cheers and chants of “Julia, Julia.”
Navalny’s exiled supporters broadcast videos of protests in Russia and abroad on YouTube.
“People saw that they were not alone”
“We have shown ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia and that Putin has taken power in Russia,” said Ruslan Shaveddinov from the Navalny Anti-Corruption Foundation. “Our victory is that we, people, have overcome fear, overcome loneliness – many people have seen that they are not alone.”
Leonid Volkov, an exiled adviser to Navalny who was attacked with a hammer in Vilnius last week, estimates that a whole bunch of thousands of individuals turned out at polling stations in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities.
At least 74 people were arrested across Russia on Sunday, in keeping with OVD-Info, a gaggle that monitors the crackdown on dissent.
There have been scattered protests over the past two days as some Russians set fire to voting booths or poured green dye into ballot boxes. Russian officials called them bastards and traitors. Opponents posted several photos of ballots spoiled with slogans insulting Putin.
But Navalny’s death has deprived the opposition of its most dangerous leader, and other key opposition figures are abroad, in prison or dead.
The West sees Putin as an autocrat and a killer. US President Joe Biden last month called him a “crazy SOB”. The International Criminal Court in The Hague indicted him for an alleged war crime involving the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, which the Kremlin denies.
Putin sees the war as a part of a centuries-long battle against a declining and decadent West, which he believes humiliated Russia after the Cold War by encroaching on Moscow’s sphere of influence.
“Putin’s task now is to permanently etch his worldview in the minds of the Russian political establishment” to make sure a like-minded successor, Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program on the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, told the Russia Matters Project.
“For a U.S. administration that had hoped that Putin’s adventure in Ukraine would already end in a decisive setback for Moscow’s interests, the election is a reminder that Putin expects many more rounds in the geopolitical boxing ring.”
The Russian election is happening at what Western spy chiefs say is a crossroads in Ukraine and the broader West, in what Biden sees as a twenty first century struggle between democracies and autocracies.
Support for Ukraine is embroiled in U.S. domestic politics ahead of the November presidential election, in which Biden will face his predecessor Donald Trump. Trump’s Republican Party in Congress blocked military aid to Kiev.
While Kiev regained territory after the 2022 invasion, Russian forces recently made gains after a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive last 12 months.
The Biden administration fears Putin could take more of Ukraine if Kiev doesn’t get more support soon. CIA Director William Burns said this might embolden China.
Putin claims that the West is engaged in a hybrid war against Russia, and that Western intelligence and Ukraine are attempting to disrupt the elections.
Voting can also be happening in Crimea, which Moscow took from Ukraine in 2014, and in 4 other regions of Ukraine that it partially controls and claims as of 2022. Kiev considers elections in the occupied territory illegal and invalid.
