Vladimir Putin claims landslide Russian election
victory
Russian president uses victory speech to say war in
Ukraine and strengthening military will be his main tasks
Pjotr Sauer
and Andrew Roth
Sun 17 Mar
2024 19.19 EDT
Vladimir
Putin has claimed a landslide victory in Russia’s presidential vote, as
thousands in the country and around the world protested against his deepening
dictatorship, the war in Ukraine and a stage-managed election that could have
only one winner.
In a vote
denounced by the United States as “obviously not free nor fair”, Putin won 87%
of the vote, according to exit polling published by the state-run Russian
Public Opinion Research Center and the Public Opinion Foundation.
In a speech
at his campaign headquarters on Sunday evening, Putin brushed off western
criticism of the elections, telling his supporters it was “expected”.
“What did
you want, for them to applaud us? They’re fighting with us in an armed conflict
… their goal is to contain our development. Of course they’re ready to say
anything,” he said.
The war was
front and centre in his victory speech, as Putin claimed he was securing the
border from recent raids by pro-Ukrainian military units and said that his main
tasks as president would be the war in Ukraine “strengthening defence capacity
and the military”.
Asked about
the potential for a direct conflict with Nato, he said: “I think that
everything is possible in the modern world … everyone understands that this
would be one step from a full-scale third world war. I don’t think that anyone
is interested in that.”
He also
responded for the first time to the death of Alexei Navalny, claiming he had
given approval to exchange the Kremlin critic for Russian prisoners in the west
shortly before his death. “Unfortunately, what happened happened,” he said. “I
agreed under one condition: we swap him, and he doesn’t come back. But that’s
life.”
After
counting 75% of the votes, Russia’s electoral commission said Putin was leading
with 87.14% of the vote. In second place was the Communist party candidate,
Nikolai Kharitonov.
The
government claimed turnout was the highest in history at 74% of the electorate.
Putin’s previous highest result came in 2018, when he purported to earn 76.7%
of the vote with a 67.5% turnout.
As Putin
sought a public mandate for his war in Ukraine and a fifth presidential term,
the Kremlin’s electoral machine sought to boost his share of the vote and
turnout to near farcical levels, posting results that used to appear only in
Russia’s most despotic regions such as Chechnya.
In the face
of Putin’s predictable victory, Russia’s embattled opposition sought to put
together its own show of strength. Long queues formed at several polling
stations in Moscow and other Russian cities as people took up a call from
Navalny’s widow to head to the polls at noon on Sunday.
At an
appearance at the Russian embassy in Berlin, Yulia Navalnaya urged her
supporters to appear en masse in the symbolic show of strength, labelled “noon
against Putin”. Her husband endorsed the plan before he died suddenly in an
Arctic prison a month ago.
Navalnaya
was greeted with huge applause and chants from voters and thanked people for
turning up to honour her husband. “You give me hope that everything is not in
vain, that we will still fight,” she said in a post on Sunday. She said she had
written “Navalny” on her ballot paper.
The
elections were quickly criticised by western countries. The US national
security council spokesperson, John Kirby, said: “The elections are obviously
not free nor fair given how Mr Putin has imprisoned political opponents and
prevented others from running against him.”
The
Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in an address on Sunday evening, said
Putin had become “addicted to power”.
“This
imitation of ‘elections’ has no legitimacy and cannot have any,” he said. “This
person must end up in the dock in The Hague. This is what we must ensure,
anyone in the world who values life and decency.”
The German
foreign ministry wrote in a post on X that the “pseudo-election in #Russia is
neither free nor fair, the result will surprise nobody. Putin’s rule is
authoritarian, he relies on censorship, repression & violence. The
‘election’ in the occupied territories of #Ukraine is null and void &
another breach of international law.”
Navalny’s
team called on voters to spoil their ballot papers, write “Alexei Navalny”
across the voting slip or vote for one of the three candidates standing against
Putin, though the opposition regards them as Kremlin “puppets”.
Reports
from the ground suggested that queues suddenly formed at numerous polling
stations across Russia’s big cities as the clock struck midday.
Leonid
Volkov, a Navalny aide who was attacked by an unknown assailant with a hammer
in Vilnius last week, said several thousand queues had formed at midday at
polling stations across the country.
Ruslan
Shaveddinov of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation said: “We showed ourselves,
all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia, that Putin has
seized power in Russia.”
En route to
Putin’s win, Russia disqualified anti-war candidates, launched an unparalleled
get-out-the-vote campaign targeted at state workers, and spent more than £1bn
on a propaganda drive, according to leaked documents shared with the Guardian.
The Russian
leader has faced no meaningful contest after the authorities barred two
candidates who had voiced their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Three other
politicians running in the election did not directly question Putin’s authority
and their participation was meant to add an air of legitimacy to the race.
Long queues
also formed at noon in places popular among Russian émigrés such as Berlin,
Yerevan in Armenia, London and the Thai island of Phuket. Hundreds of thousands
of Russians are estimated to have left the country since the start of the
invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.
“This
action was Navalny’s last wish. We just had to come today at noon,” said
Dmitry, a Russian voter who moved to Phuket shortly after the start of the war
in Ukraine. He asked for his last name to be withheld for fear of
repercussions.
The German
broadcaster Deutsche Welle estimated that more than 2,000 voters turned up for
the midday protest outside the Russian embassy in Berlin.
On Friday
Russian prosecutors threatened any voters who took part in the “noon against
Putin” action with five years in prison. In the southern city of Kazan, police
detained more than 20 voters who had joined the protest, according to the
independent rights monitor OVD-Info. Arrests were also reported in Moscow and
St Petersburg.
Russians
had made individual acts of protest, including pouring dye into ballot boxes
and arson attacks at polling stations, in the preceding days.
Ella
Pamfilova, Russia’s election commissioner, said those who spoiled ballots were
“bastards”, and the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said those
responsible could face treason sentences of 20 years. Russia’s interior
ministry said it had filed 155 administrative charges and opened 61 criminal
cases during the elections, including 21 cases of obstructing voters’ rights.
Stanislav
Andreychuk, a co-chair of the Golos independent election watchdog, said the
pressure on voters from law enforcement had reached absurd levels.
“It’s the
first time in my life that I’ve seen such absurdities and I’ve been observing
elections for 20 years,” Andreychuk wrote on Telegram, referring to the actions
of police who he said were checking ballots before they were cast.
Under
constitutional changes that he orchestrated in 2020, Putin is eligible to seek
two more six-year terms after his latest expires next year, potentially
allowing him to remain in power until 2036.
By 2029 his
tenure will have surpassed that of Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union
for 29 years, making Putin the country’s longest-serving leader since the
Russian empire.
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