The Scotsman

Russians cast votes in election that holds little suspense

◆ President Putin virtually unchalleng­ed and all but certain to secure fifth term in office after crushing dissent with ruthless crackdown

- Dasha Litvinova www.scotsman.com

Voters are heading to the polls in Russia for a three-day presidenti­al election that is all but certain to extend President Vladimir Putin’s rule by six more years after he stifled dissent.

At least half a dozen cases of vandalism at polling stations were reported, including a fire bombing.

The election takes place against the backdrop of a ruthless crackdown that has crippled independen­t media and prominent rights groups and given Mr Putin full control of the political system.

It also comes as moscow’ s war in Ukraine enters its third year. Russia has the advantage on the battlefiel­d, where it is making small, if slow, gains. A Russian missile strike on the port city of Odesa killed at least 14 people yesterday, local officials said.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has made Moscow look vulnerable behind the front line: Longrange drone attacks have struck deep inside Russia, while hightech drones have put its Black Sea fleet on the defensive.

Russian regions bordering Ukraine have reported several attempts by Ukrainian fighters to take towns this week. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said yesterday that“it is beyond any doubt that they are related one way or another to attempts to cast a shadow on the elections”.

Voters are casting their ballots until tomorrow at polling stations across the vast country’s 11 time zones, in illegally annexed regions of Ukraine and online. Officials said that voting was proceeding in an orderly fashion.

But in St Petersburg, a woman threw a Molotov cocktail onto the roof of a school that houses a polling station, local news media reported. The deputy head of the Russian Central Election Commission said people poured green liquid into ballot boxes in five places, including in Moscow.

News sites also reported on the Telegram messaging channel that a woman in Moscow set fire to a voting booth. Such acts are incredibly risky since interferin­g with elections is punishable by up to five years in prison.

The election holds little suspense since Mr Putin, 71, is running for his fifth term virtually unchalleng­ed. His political opponents are either in jail or in exile abroad, and the fiercest of them, Alexei Navalny, died in a remote Arctic penal colony last month. The three other candidates on the ballot are low-profile politician­s from token opposition parties.

Observers have little to no expectatio­n that the election will be free and fair. Beyond the fact that voters have been presented with little choice, the possibilit­ies for independen­t monitoring are very limited.

Only registered candidates or state-backed advisory bodies can assign observers to polling stations, decreasing the likelihood of independen­t watchdogs. With balloting over three days in nearly 100,000 polling stations in the country, any true monitoring is difficult anyway.

“The elections in Russia as a whole are a sham. The Kremlin controls who’s on the ballot. The Kremlin controls how they can campaign. To say nothing of being able to control every aspect of the voting and the vote-counting process,” said Sam Greene, director for Democratic Resilience at the Centre for european policy analysis in Washington.

Ukraine and the West have also condemned Russia for holding the vote in Ukrainian regions that Moscow’s forces have seized and occupied.

In many ways, Ukraine is at the heart of this election, political analysts and opposition figures say. They say Mr Putin wantstouse­hisall-but-assured electoral victory as evidence that the war and his handling of it enjoys widespread support. The opposition, meanwhile, hopes to use the vote to demonstrat­e their discontent with both the war and the Kremlin.

The Kremlin banned two politician­s from the ballot who sought to run on an anti-war agenda and attracted genuine — albeit not overwhelmi­ng — support, thus depriving the voters of any choice on the“main issue of Russia’ s political agenda”, said political analyst abb as Gal lyamov,w housed to work as Mr Putin’s speechwrit­er.

Russia’s scattered opposition has urged those unhappy with Mr Putin or the war to show up at the polls at noon tomorrow, the final day of voting, in protest.the strategy was endorsed by Mr Navalny not long before his death.

“We need to use election day to show that we exist and there are many of us, we are actual, living, real people and we are against Putin. … What to do next is up to you. you can vote for any candidate except Put in. You could ruin your ballot,” his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said.

How well this strategy will work remains unclear.

Golos, Russia’s renowned independen­t election observer group, said in a report this week that authoritie­s were “doing everything so that the people don’t notice the very fact of the election happening”.

The watchdog described the campaign ahead of the vote as “practicall­y unnoticeab­le” and “the most vapid” since 2000, when Golos was founded and started monitoring elections in Russia. Mr Putin’s campaignin­g was cloaked in presidenti­al activities, and other candidates were “demonstrab­ly passive”, the report said.

State media dedicated less air time to the election than in 2018, when mr put in was last elected, according to Golos. Instead of promoting the vote to ensure a desired turnout, authoritie­s appear to be betting on pressuring voters they can control – for instance, russians who work in state-run companies or institutio­ns–to show up at the polls, the group said.

 ?? ?? A woman casts her ballot as service members register to vote during Russia’s presidenti­al election in Moscow
A woman casts her ballot as service members register to vote during Russia’s presidenti­al election in Moscow
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