Western nations have widely condemned Russia’s presidential election, in which Vladimir Putin claimed a landslide victory that will keep him in power until at least 2030 amid a crackdown on dissent and opposition.
“These Russian elections starkly underline the depth of repression under President Putin’s regime, which seeks to silence any opposition to his illegal war,” said the British foreign secretary, David Cameron, as EU foreign ministers met to approve new sanctions against 30 individuals and organisations in response to the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“Putin removes his political opponents, controls the media, and then crowns himself the winner. This is not democracy,” Cameron said.
In Washington, the state department spokesperson Vedant Patel denounced the election as “undemocratic” and said the US would not congratulate Putin. “This was an incredibly undemocratic process,” Patel told reporters, detailing the jailing and disqualification of opponents and Navalny’s death in an Arctic penal colony. “He is likely to remain the president of Russia, but that does not excuse him of his autocracy,” Patel said.
Calling Russia a dictatorship, a German government spokesperson said the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, would not congratulate Putin on his re-election in a vote viewed by Berlin as “predetermined”.
The official tally from the three-day election was a 87.28% share of the vote for Putin, which the Kremlin on Monday portrayed as a dominant victory, saying the results showed that the people had consolidated around the Russian president.
The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters: “This is the most eloquent confirmation of the level of support from the population of the country for its president, and its consolidation around him.”
In a victory speech on Sunday, Putin dismissed western criticism of the election as unfair and undemocratic, telling his supporters it was “expected”. He also for the first time addressed Navalny’s death, which he called a “sad event”.
At a concert on Moscow’s Red Square on Monday evening to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the annexation of Crimea, Putin basked in his election win, singing the national anthem with a crowd waving Russian flags.
“Hand in hand, we will move forward and this will make us stronger ... Long live Russia,” Putin said.
Putin’s swift seizure of Crimea in March 2014 is seen as the beginning of 10 years of military action against Ukraine and a cornerstone of Putin’s reimagined Russia.
Putin told the crowd that Crimea was the “pride of Russia” and that the Black Sea peninsula had “come back to its native harbour” when Moscow annexed the region.
He attended the concert alongside the three loyalist presidential candidates who ran against him.
The Russian president usually speaks at the annual celebration that marks the Crimea annexation, a speech that was preceded on Monday by patriotic songs performed by pro-Putin singers.
Several independent Russian outlets reported that state employees and students had been ordered to attend the celebrations. Russia has a long history of state employees being coerced to attend pro-government rallies.
Together with the crowd, Putin sang the Russian national anthem before leaving the stage.
Putin’s vote share, which equates to 76 million votes and is by far the biggest in post-Soviet Russian history, follows an election described as a mockery by an independent monitor group.
The independent Russian election watchdog Golos said it had found unprecedented levels of fraud in the presidential elections. “Never before have we seen a presidential [election] campaign that fell so far short of constitutional standards,” said Golos, whose co-director is now in jail in Russia.
“The elections failed to fulfil their main function: to reflect the real mood of citizens, and they did not allow [citizens] to independently and freely make decisions about the future of their country,” it added.
While shunned by the west, there were congratulations for Putin from the leaders of China and North Korea, two countries that have propped up Moscow in its fighting in Ukraine. Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, hailed Putin’s “decisive victory”, the state news agency IRNA reported. Russia has deployed Iran-made drones against Ukrainian cities.
Putin also received messages from India and the United Arab Emirates, two traditional western allies that Moscow has successfully courted since the start of the war in Ukraine more than two years ago.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, offered his “warm congratulations” to Putin, adding that he looked forward to developing their “special” relationship. Russia is India’s biggest arms supplier.
