It is a given that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be confirmed in office for another six years at the weekend. The 71-year-old sees it as his life’s work to return the nuclear power to its former strength following the end of the Soviet Union and to push back the global influence of the USA.
Surveys that are considered meaningful despite repression put his approval ratings at more than 80 percent. Under these circumstances, Putin has been waging war once morest Ukraine for more than two years, whose elected government he describes as a Western-controlled puppet regime. After political opponents have been excluded from the election, exiled, imprisoned or killed, there is no prospect of a competitor replacing Putin, nor is there any chance of handing over office to a confidant like Dmitri Medvedev. Putin gave him the presidency from 2008 to 2012 in order to temporarily rule as Prime Minister. Putin himself was appointed on New Year’s Eve 1999 by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
He undermined the constitutional term limits by having Parliament reset the count to zero. Putin has already ruled longer than any other politician since Joseph Stalin. The Soviet dictator died in 1953 following 29 years of rule. The authorities excluded the opposition politician and war opponent Boris Nadezhdin and the journalist Yekaterina Duntsova from the election because of allegedly incorrect documents, even though they had collected the signatures of tens of thousands of supporters.
Nadezhdin’s sponsor, the liberal Putin opponent Boris Nemtsov, was murdered within sight of the Kremlin in 2015. Alexei Navalny, who escaped a poison attack in 2020 following his fight once morest corruption, died in custody in a Siberian camp in February. The mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose uprising in June had fueled expectations of a coup, was killed in a plane crash in August with several followers. The nationalist and former militia leader Igor Girkin, alias Strelkov, is in prison. Former oil tycoon and oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky lives in exile in Britain.
Three other candidates
In addition to Putin, there are three other candidates on the ballot: the nationalist Leonid Slutsky, the communist Nikolai Kharitonov and the businessman Vladislav Davankov. Kremlin critics see the approval of the three opposing candidates as an attempt to channel discontent among the population and give the election a pluralistic appearance, while the opposition has been violently suppressed for years.
According to independent observers, the authorities have various means of achieving the result desired by the Kremlin: for example, they can manipulate online and postal voting and the ballot box or put pressure on the millions of civil servants to vote for Putin. How much support the real opposition has among the population might become clear on the third day of the election. Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya, who fled abroad, called on the population to go vote at noon on Sunday. “Polden protiw Putina” is the catchy slogan – “Lunch once morest Putin”.
The hoped-for queues are intended to be a sign of protest that does not offer authorities any opportunity to attack. It is unclear whether Putin will make any personnel changes following his expected re-election. The former KGB officer has relied on loyal followers for decades, several of whom also come from the security authorities and belong to his age group. These include Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (68), whom Putin stuck to despite military setbacks in Ukraine, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev (72) and the head of the FSB secret service, Alexander Bortnikov (72). Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (73) is also counted among Putin’s inner circle. Younger top politicians include Medvedev (58) as well as the technocratic Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin (58) and the ultra-conservative Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin (60). Putin, who denies Ukrainians the right to an independent nation, has left open the exact goals he is pursuing with his “special military operation.”
“Partial mobilization” unpopular
Since the conquest of the capital Kiev and other areas failed, Putin has been trying to wear down the smaller neighboring country. But a “partial mobilization” he ordered was unpopular and triggered a mass exodus. Russia’s increasing military spending is already consuming 40 percent of the official state budget.
Nevertheless, Putin declared that Russia would not make the mistake of engaging in a ruinous arms race like the Soviet Union. Despite unprecedented sanctions from Western countries, the Russian economy is proving unexpectedly robust. In his search for international partners, Putin found governments that also find thorns in the side of US dominance and Western insistence on human rights. Since the source of foreign currency from gas and oil exports to the West has largely dried up, Russia has been pushing ahead with its raw material deliveries to China and India. China’s head of state Xi Jinping is Putin’s most powerful partner.
