2024-03-18 03:01:00
Russian President Vladimir Putin will continue to lead the Russian Executive until 2030 following exceeding 87 percent of the votes according to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) following reaching 75 percent of the vote. Putin achieved his biggest electoral victory since he came to power in 2000, despite the war in Ukraine, and will remain president of this country for another six years. He will be able to run for reelection once more, since in 2020 he reformed the clauses of the Constitution that prevented him from continuing in the Kremlin.
The CEC, which did not invite observers from the European Union, denied that serious irregularities occurred, although independent experts and the press in exile reported several cases of electoral manipulation. Ukraine and Western foreign ministries denounced the absence of opposition candidates and illegal voting in the four Ukrainian regions annexed by the Russian Army. However, the percentage of votes that Putin achieved speaks for itself, while participation reached the record figure of 74.22 percent.
After the first results of the scrutiny were known, Putin thanked the Russians for accompanying him and greeted the soldiers fighting in Ukraine. The president acknowledged that there was an agreement to exchange the opponent Alexei Navalny with Western countries, but his death frustrated its realization. The elections were marked by drone attacks and Ukrainian border raids, which left several dead and led Putin to accuse Kiev of trying to torpedo his re-election.
Almost 100 million votes
Putin, a 71-year-old former KGB agent, has been in power since the beginning of 2000. If he completes another term, he will have remained in power longer than any other Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century. More than 98 million Russians out of a total of 112 million who were called to the polls voted in favor of re-election for a fifth term of the current president.
The rivals
Putin’s overwhelming victory benefited from the increase in the number of voters, since 4.5 million voters came from the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. The second most voted candidate was the communist Nikolai Kharitonov with 4.17 percent of the votes, followed by the representative of the New People party, Vladislav Davankov, with 4.07 percent.
The last in contention is the ultranationalist Leonid Slutski, who has 3.15 percent of the votes. The opposition to the Kremlin might not attend the elections, since the CEC did not register its candidates for various technical reasons or formal defects, and for supporting peace in Ukraine, an inadmissible option for the Russian government.
As in Soviet times, the Kremlin launched its entire administrative machinery to mobilize the population. In the country’s two main cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg, more than two-thirds of the electorate voted and Putin received between 80 and 90 percent of the votes. In the occupied areas of Ukraine, between 88 and 95 percent of voters opted for the current tenant of the Kremlin, with participation also above 80 percent, despite intense fighting. Even in Moscow prisons Putin achieved more than 82 percent of the votes.
The opposition suspects that the authorities forced public sector employees to vote, threatened with losing their jobs, following more than half of the census already voted in the first two days. In addition, millions of Russians voted electronically, either from home or at terminals in schools, which the opposition considers an instrument of fraud.
Negotiations for Navalny
After tens of thousands of people attended Navalny’s funeral, the dissidents called their supporters to the peaceful action “Noon once morest Putin” to express their rejection of the Kremlin and the war. Overall, the opposition’s actions were calm, but the NGO OVD-Info reported at least 77 arrests for various forms of electoral protest.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who voted at the Russian embassy in Berlin, said she wrote her late husband’s name on the ballot. About 800 people protested once morest Putin’s government around the embassy, where they shouted “victory for Ukraine. Freedom for Russia”, “Navalni, he is a hero of Russia” or “Putin is illegitimate.”
In a press conference following achieving victory in the presidential elections, Putin assured that he approved the Navalny exchange days before he died suddenly in an Arctic prison. “Believe me or not. The man who spoke to me had not finished his sentence and I already said: I agree. But unfortunately what happened happened,” said Putin, who for the first time pronounced Navalny’s name.
The Russian president said that someone who does not belong to the presidential administration (Navalny’s allies mentioned tycoon Roman Abramovich) proposed to exchange the opponent for Russians imprisoned in European countries. “But with one condition I accepted it: we exchange it, but that it doesn’t come back once more. That it stays there. But that’s life,” he said. Putin alluded to “Mr. Navalny” and described his death in a prison in the Arctic Circle as “a sad event.”
In an appearance that was broadcast on state television, Putin thanked Russians for voting in the presidential elections and assured that “no one has ever managed to do something like this in history.” Regarding the conflict with Ukraine, the re-elected president stressed that the priority is “to achieve the objectives within the framework of the special military operation and strengthen the Armed Forces.”
“Drunk with power”
The offensive in Ukraine, launched by Putin in February 2022 and with no end in sight despite tens of thousands of deaths, was the backdrop for the vote, especially with a spike in attacks once morest Russian territory in the latter. week. After knowing the first results, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky estimated that Putin is “drunk with power” and wants to “reign eternally.” The United Kingdom regretted the absence of “free and fair” elections in Russia, while Poland considered that the Russian presidential election “is not legal, free or fair.”
Putin denounced this Sunday that NATO soldiers are already fighting in Ukraine and are dying “in large numbers” on the battlefield. “The soldiers of the NATO countries are present there. We know it,” Putin said at the press conference this Sunday, and assured that the Russian soldiers hear them speaking in French and English, which, he said, “does not It’s nothing good, mainly for them, since they die. “And they do it in large quantities,” he added. Regarding a possible conflict between Russia and the Atlantic alliance, Putin responded that “in today’s world anything is possible.”
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