Thousands of Russians queued for hours in the freezing cold across the country over the past few days to show their support for an anti-war candidate before this year’s stage-managed presidential ballot in which Vladimir Putin is the only permitted winner.
Boris Nadezhdin, a centre-right candidate who has called himself a “principled opponent” of the war, has said in his manifesto that Putin made a “fatal mistake by starting the special military operation”, the Kremlin’s preferred term for its invasion. “Putin sees the world from the past and is dragging Russia into the past.”
