With new six-year term, Putin cements hold on Russian leadership

BERLIN — President Vladimir Putin on Sunday extended his rule over Russia until 2030, using a heavily stage-managed presidential election with no real competition to portray overwhelming public support for his domestic dominance and his invasion of Ukraine.

Some Russians tried to turn the undemocratic vote into a protest, forming long lines at polling stations at a predetermined time — noon — to register their discontent. At the same time, Ukraine sought to cast its own vote of sorts by firing a volley of exploding drones at Moscow and other targets.

Butthe Kremlin brushed those challenges aside and released results after the polls closed claiming that Mr. Putin had won 87% of the vote — a higher share than in the four previous elections he participated in.

Afterward, Mr. Putin took a lengthy, televised victory lap, including a swaggering, after midnight news conference at which he commented on the death of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny for the first time, referring to it as an “unfortunate incident.”

Mr. Putin is now set to use his new six-year term to further cement his control of Russian politics and to press on with the war in Ukraine. If he sees the term through to its end, he will become the longest-serving Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 1700s.

Western governments were quick to condemn the election as undemocratic. Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for President Joseph R. Biden’s National Security Council, said: “The elections were obviously not free nor fair.”

But as Mr. Putin prepares to assume a fifth term as president, he appears as emboldened as ever, deepening his confrontation with the West and showing a willingness to keep escalating tensions. Asked at the news conference whether he believed that a full-scale conflict between Russia and NATO was possible, Mr. Putin responded: “I think that anything is possible in today’s world.”

Despite condemnation from the West, the Kremlin views these elections as a ritual crucial to Mr. Putin’s portrayal of himself as a genuinely popular leader. Analysts now expect him to elevate hard-line supporters of the war within the Russian government, betting that Western support for Ukraine will eventually crumble and Ukraine’s government will be forced to negotiate a peace deal on Russia’s terms.

Asked about priorities for his next term, Mr. Putin began by referring to his invasion of Ukraine. “We need to carry out the tasks in the context of the special military operation,” he said. The results, he said, have helped “consolidate society” around his leadership, a refrain also repeated on state television.

The extent of the Russian public’s true support for Mr. Putin in the election was hard to judge, given that opposition candidates were barred from running and that ballot-stuffing and other cases of fraud were common occurrences in past Russian elections. This was also the least transparent election in recent Russian history, with the work of independent poll observers reduced to levels not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

More than 5 million votes were reported to have come from Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, where people were at times directed to cast their votes under the watch of armed Russian soldiers; in Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region, Mr. Putin was reported to have received 95% of the vote.

In the last presidential election, in 2018, Mr. Putin’s official result was 78% of the vote — some 10 points lower than this weekend.

Grigorii Golosov, a political scientist in St. Petersburg, said in a phone interview that he was surprised by the high share of the vote the Kremlin claimed, describing it as “characteristic of extremely closed autocracies.”

“They can declare any results they want, given that the process is not transparent,” Mr. Golosov said. “All that these results speak to is the degree of control over the electoral system, the election process, that the Russian authorities have attained.”

For the first time in a Russian presidential election, the vote lasted for three days, from Friday to Sunday — an extended period that made it easier for the Kremlin to drive up turnout, and harder for anyone to spot fraud.

Ever since Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian authorities have mounted a campaign of repression unseen since Soviet times, effectively criminalizing any form of anti-war speech. —