Russians vote in polls that could extend Putin reign
RUSSIANS across the vast country began voting Friday in a three-day presidential election that is expected to see Vladimir Putin re-elected for a fourth term.
Amid the Ukraine war, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, the 71-year-old Kremlin chief dominates Russia’s political landscape and none of the other three candidates on the ballot paper presents any credible challenge.
The Kremlin says Putin, in power as president or prime minister since the last day of 1999, will win as he commands broad support for rescuing Russia from post-Soviet chaos and standing up to what it sees as an arrogant, hostile West.
From Chukotka on the Pacific 6,300 kilometers (3,900 miles) away from Moscow to the Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea bordering Poland, some of Russia’s more than 190 ethnic groups turned out to vote in national costume.
In Yakutsk, an eastern Siberian city where the temperature was minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit), the descendent of a Yukaghir shaman asked spirits to bring good luck to the winner of the election during a ceremony at one polling station.
In other Russian cities, one woman dressed up as Barbie and another came to a polling station dressed in a tiger outfit.
But the shadow of the Ukraine war hangs over the election: Russia has more than 1 million men in arms and several hundred thousand fighting a grinding artillery and drone war along the 1,000-kilometer (600 miles) front line in Ukraine.
More than 114 million Russians are eligible to vote, including in what Moscow calls its “new territories” – four regions of Ukraine that its forces only partly control, but which it has claimed as part of Russia. Ukraine says the staging of elections there is illegal and void.