Closing summary
It’s coming up to 10pm in Ukraine, and the Ukraine blog is closing.
Here’s a summary of today’s key events:
Exit polls show Vladimir Putin winning a huge majority in Russia’s presidential election which had only one possible result. Polls suggest 71-year-old Putin has won the election with nearly 88% of the vote, and will overtake Joseph Stalin to become Russia’s longest-serving leader for more than 200 years. Putin was standing for the six-year term against three candidates from parties who have not criticised his rule nor his invasion of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Putin was “imitating” yet another election, adding that Russian leader would stop at nothing to rule forever and his election has no legitimacy.
Britain, Poland, German and the US have criticised the election process as neither free nor fair. The British Foreign Office minister David Cameron said the elections had been held illegally in Ukrainian territory and offered “a lack of choice for voters and no independent monitoring”. The Polish Foreign Office said that voting took place in conditions of extreme repression. The German Foreign Ministry described the process as a pseudo-election and the White House said the elections were “obviously not free, nor fair”.
Nationwide turnout was 74.22% at 6pm when polls closed, officials said, surpassing the 67.5% seen in 2018.
At least 74 people were arrested across Russia in connection with the election, according to OVD-Info. Despite tight controls, there have been several dozen cases of vandalism at polling stations.
Anti-Putin protests took place outside polling stations as Russian citizens lined up to vote at Russian embassies around the world.
A Russian missile attack on the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv earlier today killed a man and wounded eight people.
That’s it from me, Donna Ferguson. It’s been a privilege for me to write the blog today. Thanks for following along. If you want to continue following news on the Russian presidential elections, go to https://www.theguardian.com/world/russia
Foreign Office minister David Cameron has spoken out about the election:
The polls have closed in Russia, following the illegal holding of elections on Ukrainian territory, a lack of choice for voters and no independent OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) monitoring. This is not what free and fair elections look like.”
