Long queues formed at several polling stations in Moscow and other Russian cities as people took up a call from Alexei Navalny’s widow to head to the polls at noon on Sunday in a symbolic show of dissent against Vladimir Putin’s all but certain re-election as president.
In the run-up to the three-day presidential elections, Yulia Navalnaya urged her supporters to protest against Putin by appearing en masse at midday on Sunday in a legal show of strength against the longtime Russian leader.
The polling protest was labelled “noon against Putin” and Navalny endorsed the plan before he died.
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 queues suddenly formed at numerous polling stations across Russia’s big cities as the clock struck midday.
“At 11.55, there was no line at all. At 12.01 there was already a line of about 80 people,” Mediazona, an independent Russian outlet, reported from a polling station in the north-east of Moscow.
Fontanka, a St Petersburg-based outlet, published footage of a long queue forming at a polling station on Nevsky Prospekt, the principal avenue in the centre of Russia’s second biggest city.
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.”
There was no independent tally of how many of Russia’s 114 million voters turned out at noon to show opposition to Putin, and many polling stations did not report an increase in the flow of voters.
Still, the long queues at some stations will be seen by many as a rare display of dissent at a time of unprecedented repression in the country.
Independent Russian media outlets also published images of spoiled ballots posted by voters, with “killer and thief” inscribed on some as well as the name “Navalny.”
Sunday is the final day of a presidential election that is guaranteed to cement Putin’s hardline 24-year rule until at least 2030.
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 do not directly question Putin’s authority and their participation is 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 their country since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago.
“This action was Navalnly’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, who asked for his last name to be withheld for fear of repercussions.
“I am here to honour his legacy,” he said, adding that he had spoiled the ballot by writing Navalny’s name.
The German Deutsche Welle outlet estimated more than 2,000 voters turned up for the midday protest outside the Russian embassy in Berlin.
Among the participants was Yulia Navalnaya, who was greeted with huge applause and chants from voters. She took photos with fellow protesters and thanked people for turning up to honour her husband a month after his sudden death in an Arctic prison.
Russian prosecutors had on Friday 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.
Individual acts of protest including pouring dye into ballot boxes and arson attacks at polling stations had already taken place before Sunday.
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.
Putin has won previous elections by a landslide, but independent election watchdogs say they were marred by widespread fraud.
Before this election, the state-backed VTsIOM polling agency predicted Russians would give Putin 82% of the vote, his highest ever return, on a turnout of 71%.
To bolster turnout, the Kremlin rolled out a series of new tools to help its “get out the vote” campaign, including a three-day voting period and electronic voting in 29 regions including Moscow, as well as efforts by the heads of state-run enterprises to entice or force thousands of workers to the polls.
By Sunday morning Russia’s electoral commission said turnout had exceeded 73%, surpassing 2018 levels an hour before the end of polling.
An exit poll will be published shortly after voting ends at 6pm GMT.
Stanislav Andreychuk, 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 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.
If he remains president until then, his tenure will surpass even that of Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union for 29 years, making Putin the country’s longest-serving leader since the Russian empire.
The elections are taking place against a backdrop of intensifying Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil facilities and a rare cross-border raid by anti-Putin militias.
Putin on Friday lashed out at Kyiv for the continuing raid along the Russian border, which he called an attempt to “disrupt the voting process [and] intimidate people in at least those areas which border Ukraine”.
Ukraine continued its drone strikes on Russia on Sunday, launching 35 against broad areas of the country, sparking a brief fire at an oil refinery, targeting an airport in Moscow and disrupting electricity in border areas, Russia’s defence ministry said.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, praised Kyiv’s ability to strike deep inside Russian territory in his overnight address on Saturday. He said it had become clear in recent weeks that Ukraine could use its weapons to exploit what he called vulnerabilities in the “Russian war machine”. “What our own drones can do is truly a long-range Ukrainian capability,” he said.
