Vladimir Putin won, according to initial data on Sunday, with 87% of the votes a presidential election which had been calibrated to guarantee his triumph, in the absence of an opposition decimated by repression and not even able to present a candidate. This score provided following a survey by the official Vtsiom institute was announced on state television. And according to the Russian electoral commission, the master of the Kremlin gathered 87.97% of the votes after the counting of votes in 24% of polling stations. A record for someone who had always received between 64 and 68% of the votes in previous elections.
Russian President Vladimir Putin thanked Russians on Sunday for voting in the presidential election: “First of all, I would like to thank the citizens, we are all one team, all the citizens of Russia who went to the polling stations and who voted,” Vladimir Putin told his campaign team during an intervention broadcast on state television.
Putin is ‘drunk with power’ and ‘wants to rule forever’, says Volodymyr Zelensky
The government had previously insisted that the Russian people must be “united” behind their leader, presenting the Ukrainian conflict as hatched by the West to destroy Russia. The assault on Ukraine, launched by the master of the Kremlin in February 2022 and which has no end in sight despite its tens of thousands of deaths, was the backdrop to the vote, especially that attacks on Russian territory have increased this week.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Vladimir Putin was a man “drunk with power” who wants to “rule forever”. Poland, for its part, judged that the presidential election was “not legal, free and fair”. In Russia, the authorities left no room for opponents of power: the three other candidates selected were all in line with the Kremlin, whether it was Ukraine or the repression which culminated in death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison in February.
In this context, the wife of Vladimir Putin’s late critic No. 1, Yulia Navalnaïa, called on her supporters to show up in numbers by all going to vote at the same time, at noon on Sunday, against the Russian president.
“I wrote Navalny,” said Yulia Navalnaya
She herself voted after several hours of waiting in a huge crowd at the Russian embassy in Berlin. “I wrote (on the ballot) the name ‘Navalny’ because it is not possible (…) that a month before the elections, the main opponent of Putin, already imprisoned, would be killed “, she told the press after voting. As he left the embassy, his supporters chanted “Ioulia, Ioulia, we are with you!”, noted AFP. She also called Vladimir Putin a “killer” and a “gangster.”
Outside many other Russian embassies, large crowds turned out to vote at noon across the world, with tens of thousands of Russians having gone into exile since the start of the assault on Ukraine due to repression and fear to be mobilized into the army. Alexeï Navalny’s team declared that the score obtained by Vladimir Putin in the Russian presidential election had “no connection with reality”.
In places, in Moscow, as in St. Petersburg, large queues formed at the appointed time. But in front of other polling stations, the crowds did not seem particularly high. In the Moscow district of Marino, in front of the office where Alexeï Navalny once voted, a few dozen people responded to the call. “I was able to meet a few people, talk to them, and I felt that they thought the same thing as me. I am not alone,” explains Olga, 52, before leaving with her son to reflect on the tomb of the opponent, buried in the neighborhood.
In the cemetery, dozens of people marched, placing fresh flowers on the grave as well as bulletins to which Navalny’s name had been added. Overall, the mobilization of the opposition took place calmly but the NGO OVD-Info, specializing in monitoring repression, reported at least 77 arrests in Russia for various forms of electoral protest actions.
An election marked by hostilities in Ukraine
The spokesperson for Russian diplomacy, for her part, affirmed that the voters who went en masse to embassies, such as in Paris, London and Berlin, were not supporters of the opposition. “They came to vote, seizing the opportunity that their country, Russia, offered them despite all the threats from the West,” Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram.
Hostilities in Ukraine were also included in the vote. The election week was marked by deadly airstrikes and attempted ground incursions from Ukraine into Russian territory, responses to Russia’s daily bombings and assaults against its neighbor for more than two years.
On Sunday morning, a 16-year-old girl was killed in an air attack on the town of Belgorod, close to the border and very often targeted. In the afternoon, another person died and 19 were injured in the same region. And a military unit operating from Ukraine, the “Siberian Battalion” claimed on Sunday morning to have entered the Russian hamlet of Gorkovsky. Despite these attacks, a prolonged deadly conflict and increasingly restricted freedoms, the master of the Kremlin can count on very real popularity.