‘Many people saw they were not alone’
Putin tightens grip on power but thousands join noon protest
MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin was poised to tighten his grip on power Sunday in a Russian election that is certain to deliver him a landslide victory, though thousands of opponents staged a symbolic noon protest at polling stations.
Putin, who rose to power in 1999, was set to win a new six-year term that would enable him to overtake Josef Stalin and become Russia’s longest-serving leader for more than 200 years.
The election comes just over two years since Putin triggered the deadliest European conflict since the Second World War by ordering the invasion of Ukraine. He casts it as a “special military operation.”
War has hung over the three-day election: Ukraine has repeatedly attacked oil refineries in Russia, shelled Russian regions and sought to pierce Russian borders with proxy forces — a move Putin said would not be left unpunished.
While Putin’s re-election is not in doubt given his control over Russia and the absence of any real challengers, the former KGB spy wants to show that he has the overwhelming support of Russians. Several hours before polls were due to close at 6 p.m. GMT, the nationwide turnout surpassed 2018 levels of 67.5 per cent.
Supporters of Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison last month, had called on Russians to come out at a “Noon against Putin” protest to show their dissent against a leader they cast as a corrupt autocrat.
There was no independent tally of how many of Russia’s 114 million voters took part in the opposition demonstrations, amid extremely tight security involving tens of thousands of police and security officials.
Reuters journalists saw an increase in the flow of voters, especially younger people, at noon at some polling stations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, with queues of several hundred people and even thousands.
Some said they were protesting, though there were few outward signs to distinguish them from ordinary voters.
When Navalny’s widow, Yulia, appeared at the Russian embassy in Berlin where Russians
were waiting to vote, some cheered her and chanted “Yulia, Yulia.”
Exiled Navalny supporters broadcast footage of protests inside Russia and abroad on Youtube.
“We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia, that Putin has seized power in Russia,” said Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny’s Anti-corruption Foundation. “Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated solitude — many people saw they were not alone.”
Leonid Volkov, an exiled Navalny aide who was attacked with a hammer last week in Vilnius, estimated hundreds of thousands of people had come out to polling stations in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and other cities.
SCATTERED INCIDENTS
At polling stations at Russian diplomatic missions from Australia and Japan to Armenia, Kazakhstan and Georgia, hundreds of Russians stood in line at noon.
Over the previous two days, there were scattered incidents of protest as some Russians set fire to voting booths or poured dye into ballot boxes. Russian officials called them scumbags and traitors. Opponents posted some pictures of ballots spoiled with slogans insulting Putin.
But Navalny’s death has left the opposition deprived of its most formidable leader, and other major opposition figures are abroad, in jail or dead.
The West casts Putin as an autocrat and a killer. U.S. President Joe Biden last month dubbed him a “crazy SOB.” The International Criminal Court in the Hague has indicted him for the alleged war crime of abducting Ukrainian children, which the Kremlin denies.
Putin casts the war as part of a centuries-old battle with a declining and decadent West that he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by encroaching on what Putin considers to be Russia’s sphere of influence such as Ukraine.
Russia’s election comes at what Western spy chiefs say is a crossroads for the Ukraine war and the wider West in what Biden casts as a broader 21st-century struggle between democracies and autocracies.