This content was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
Spectators continue to document abnormalities in Russia’s national vote as the Central Election Commission ( TsIK) announced Vladimir Putin had actually won a landslide victory in a vote that the global community has called a “sham” and no “free and honest. ”
TsIK said last benefits from the May 15-17 ballot showed Putin won another six-year expression with 87. 3 percent of the ballot amid a brutal assault on civil society that saw opposition suppressed and any true challengers to Putin’s era imprisoned, forced into exile, or ruled out from running on professional reasons, which came as no surprise to Kremlin critics and tight watchers of Russian politics.
While American election observers were banned from monitoring the elections, many local organizations and independent media sources estimated that as many as one-third of vote may have been falsified or tampered with in some way.
The Golos separate vote-monitoring class that Russia has labeled a “foreign agent” said two weeks after the election ended that its study of papers ballots just showed some 22 million of the document 76. 3 million seats Putin recorded were the result of “pure packing. ”
“The state did not see what was happening in the elections…. It was the most ugly, forged presidential vote in the history of the country, ” Golos’s Ivan Shukshin said in an examination of the proceedings.
The 71-year ancient Putin — who has ruled as either president or prime minister since 2000 — is set to surpass Russian tyrant Josef Stalin’s almost 30-year tenure by the end of his fresh name to become the longest-serving Russian president in more than two decades.
The vote was the first for Putin since he launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that has killed tens of thousands of Russians and led to a clear break in relations with the West.
Speaking after TsIK announced the final results on March 21, Putin thanked voters for “choosing the path the country will proceed further” and expressed thanks to what he called trust the voters showed in “supporting the current political course. ”
The vote was also held in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers are located. Moscow illegally annexed the regions since launching the invasion, though it remains unclear how much of the territory it controls.
In the tightly controlled race, Putin was opposed by three relatively unknown, Kremlin-friendly politicians whose campaigns were barely noticeable.
Prior to the election, the Kremlin banned anti-war politician Boris Nadezhdin from the ballot after tens of thousands of voters lined up in the cold to support his candidacy. Nadezhdin threatened to undermine the narrative of a nation united behind Putin and his war, experts said.
Russia’s opposition movement suffered a serious blow last month when Aleksei Navalny, who was Putin’s fiercest and most popular critic, died in unclear circumstances in a maximum-security prison in the Arctic where he was serving a 19-year sentence on charges of extremism widely seen as politically motivated.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia, has urged the international community to refuse to recognize Putin as a “legitimate” leader of the country saying the elections have “no meaning. ”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told RFE/RL this week that Russia’s presidential election was “not free nor fair ” and only confirms that Russia is “an authoritarian society, ” adding that Moscow ’s attempt to conduct the vote in occupied territories of Ukraine was a violation of international law.
Also this week, U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Kremlin’s marginalization of civil society and the “intense repression ” of independent voices in Russia mean the election “can only be described as undemocratic. ”
