The former KGB agent, who has been in power as president or prime minister since the final day of 1999, is casting the election as a show of Russians’ loyalty and support for his military assault on Ukraine, now in its third year.
Polling stations in a country spread over 11 time zones opened at 8:00 AM on Friday (20:00 GMT Thursday) on the Far Eastern Kamchatka peninsula and will close on Sunday at 8:00 PM (18:00 GMT) in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, wedged between EU members Poland and Lithuania.
Victory will allow Putin to stay in power until 2030, longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.
‘A difficult Period’
As voting started, both Moscow and Kyiv said that civilians had been killed in the latest wave of overnight aerial strikes.
Putin urged Russians to back him in the face of a “difficult period.”
“We have already shown that we can be together, defending the freedom, sovereignty and security of Russia… Today, it is critically important not to stray from this path,” he said in a pre-election message broadcast on state TV.
The Kremlin leader’s confidence is riding high as his troops recently secured their first territorial gains in Ukraine in nearly a year.
At home, his most strident and charismatic critic of the last decade, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison colony last month. He had been serving 19 years on “extremism” charges widely seen as retribution for his campaigning against the Kremlin.
Western governments and Kyiv condemned the vote as a “sham” and “farce.”
With all of Putin’s major opponents dead, in prison or in exile, the outcome of the vote is not in any doubt.
Election authorities barred the few genuine opposition candidates who tried to run against Putin, and a state-run pollster predicted earlier this week that Putin would secure more than 80%.
Landslide Victory
Voting was also being staged in occupied parts of eastern Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed.
Armed soldiers in full combat gear accompanied election officials in the eastern Donetsk region as they set up mobile voting stations on small tables in the streets and on the hoods of Soviet-era cars.
Kyiv branded the vote as a “farce” and said that staging the election in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, was “illegal.”
On Friday, EU chief Charles Michel sarcastically congratulated Putin on his “landslide victory.”
Those who oppose Putin still hope to spoil the procession. Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, is among those calling for voters to show up outside polling stations at midday on Sunday, the final day of voting, as a form of protest.
Moscow prosecutors warned that they would punish those involved in “the organization of and participation in these mass events.”
With AFP
