Voters in Russia headed to the polls across the country’s 11 time zones on Friday in a three-day presidential election that is all but certain to extend Vladimir Putin’s 24-year rule until at least 2030.
The longtime Russian leader is facing no meaningful opposition after the Russian authorities barred two candidates who had voiced their opposition to the war in Ukraine from running. Three other politicians running in the election do not directly question Putin’s authority and their participation is meant to add a facade of legitimacy to the race.
The first presidential election since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began not without incident. Local authorities in at least five regions, including Russian-annexed Crimea, reported cases involving voters spilling green antiseptic dye into ballot boxes and incidents of arson at polling stations.
Russia’s electoral commission reported that it had faced more than 10,500 cyber-attacks, and a key government website used for online voting was unavailable in some Russian regions for much of the day.
In angry comments on Friday, Putin lashed out at Kyiv for an ongoing raid along the Russian border that he called an attempt to “disrupt the voting process [and] intimidate people in at least those areas which border Ukraine”.
The start of the voting came hours after one of the deadliest Russian strikes yet on the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, which killed at least 20 people when two rockets fired from Crimea struck a residential area.
The Kremlin wants to show that it can successfully stage elections despite the war. Putin has won previous elections by a landslide but independent election watchdogs say they were marred by widespread fraud.
Before these elections, the state-backed Vtsiom polling agency predicted Russians would give Putin 82% of the vote, his highest ever return, on a turnout of 71%. By Friday afternoon, Russia’s electoral commission said turnout had already exceed 25%, including more than 2.6m ballots cast online. Putin was among those who voted online on Friday, the Kremlin said.
Russia’s best-known opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in an Arctic penal colony last month and other prominent Kremlin critics are exiled or in jail.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia, who has blamed Putin for her husband’s death, urged her supporters to protest against Putin, 71, by voting en masse at noon local time on Sunday, forming large crowds and overwhelming polling stations. The polling protest has been labelled “Noon Against Putin” and the plan was endorsed by Navalny before he died.
Navalny’s team suggested spoiling the ballot paper, writing “Alexei Navalny” across the voting slip, or voting for one of the three candidates standing against Putin.
Russian prosecutors on Thursday threatened any voters who take part in the Noon Against Putin action with five years in prison, though it remains unclear how authorities plan to crack down on the protest given that they would have no legal grounds to disperse participants.
A number of Russians took more direct action to undermine the vote. In several incidents caught on video on Friday, Russians walked up to urns carrying ballots and poured in a green antiseptic dye before being detained by police.
In Kogalym, western Siberia, a woman set a small fire inside a polling station. Video showed the fire creeping toward a ballot box before a poll worker leapt over the fire to intervene. Another video showed a voting booth in flames at a polling station in Moscow.
Ella Pamfilova, Russia’s longtime election commissioner, said those who spoiled the ballots were “bastards” and called for their arrests.
Investigators in the southern Rostov region announced the detention of a 62-year-old man on charges of obstruction of voting rights, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Footage from St Petersburg showed a woman throwing a molotov cocktail at a polling station. According to the Fontanka news outlet, the woman was arrested and could be tried on terrorism charges.
To bolster turnout, the Kremlin has 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. These are on top of familiar efforts by the heads of state-run enterprises to entice or force thousands of workers to the polls.
In the Siberian city of Omsk, young voters were given a free ticket for a ferris wheel ride at a local amusement park, the Moscow Times reported.
Elsewhere, Russian voters were offered the chance to win iPhones and hairstyling devices produced by the British household appliance firm Dyson for sending in polling station selfies.
And at a polling station in the oil-rich city of Tyumen, voters could get a picture with a cardboard cutout of the conservative Kremlin-friendly US presenter Tucker Carlson, who travelled to Russia last month to interview Putin.
Under constitutional reforms he orchestrated in 2020, Putin is eligible to seek two more six-year terms after his term expires next year, potentially allowing him to remain in power until 2036.
If he remains in power 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.
Earlier this week Moscow opened polling stations in the four Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine that it annexed in September 2022. The Ukrainian foreign ministry described the voting held in the four territories as illegal.
Before the elections, three pro-Ukrainian battalions made up of recruits from Russia launched a series of incursions into southern Russia, while Ukraine has stepped up drone strikes on oil refineries deep inside Russia in an effort to damage the country’s economy.
