Voters worldwide to protest Putin’s re-election
Global grassroots effort aims to hold Kremlin to account
If there were any doubt about the importance and sensitivity of this weekend’s Russian presidential election, it was surely erased by a shocking hammer attack.
Leonid Volkov, former top aide to deceased Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, was at his home in Lithuania — technically out of reach of Russian authorities — on Tuesday evening when an unidentified assailant smashed Volkov’s car window with a hammer, sprayed him with tear gas and then swung the hammer at his leg 15 times.
Volkov has been planning a global protest of this Sunday’s election, a contest sure to hand Russian President Vladimir Putin his fifth term as head of the country. With a visible cut to his head and his bandaged right arm in a sling, Volkov said in a video posted to Telegram on Wednesday that he suffered bad bruising and a broken arm in the attack. Still, he was defiant.
“We will work, and we will not give up,” he said, urging fellow Russians to participate in Noon Against Putin, an international campaign to protest the March 17 vote.
Putin isn’t worried about the announced outcome, but he clearly does worry about seeming popular and legitimate — an aura protesters are determined to deny him.
The plan is for eligible voters in Russia and around the world to show up at polling stations at 12 p.m., overwhelming voting capacity and causing large crowds. Within Russian territory, it’s a strategy that lets those opposed to Putin gather in one spot — and in large numbers — legally, circumventing laws that prevent political protests.
Outside the country, it’s a way of showing solidarity with those fighting Putin’s regime inside the country and reminding the world that pro-democracy Russians opposed to Putin and the war in Ukraine do, in fact, exist.
“What we’re trying to do is show that there is a different Russia,” said Anton Musonov, a Saint-Petersburg-born lecturer at the University of Waterloo.
“It is so important to show that there are a lot of Russians who are against (the war), who want just a normal Russia, one that is not at war with any other countries, that has decent relationships with everyone around the world.”
Musonov, a member of the Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance, also plans to ask people leaving the Russian consulate in Toronto on Sunday which of the four listed candidates they voted for — exit polling in a bid to independently verify the official totals.
With Navalny dead, leading Russian opposition politicians driven into exile in the crackdown that followed the invasion of Ukraine, and aspiring independent presidential candidates barred from running for Putin’s job, the election monitoring is a last-ditch global grassroots effort to hold the Kremlin to account.
“We have united to protect the democratic and universal values, rights and freedoms that our country is worthy of,” says the Vote Abroad website, which is run by activists who are recruiting exitpoll volunteers and promising to post their tallies online to compare against Moscow’s official results.
Some of those planning to protest have first-hand knowledge of the long reach of Putin’s regime.
In a 2021 vote to elect members of the Russian State Duma, Maria Kartasheva volunteered as an election observer, watching ballots be cast at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa.
She anticipated hostility from embassy staff but was pleasantly surprised when they offered her sandwiches and tea during the long process of counting ballots. She even accepted a ride home from a staffer when the count wrapped up at 4 a.m.
This time around, the 30-year-old plans to stand watch from outside the embassy. She won’t dare set foot inside after she was charged, convicted and sentenced in absentia by a Russian court to eight years in prison, for a series of social-media posts condemning Russian forces’ atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in 2022.
“It is a little scary, I’m not going to lie … Russia is known for harming people who disagree with it. We know there were countless crimes, poisoning of people abroad and murdering people abroad who were against the regime, so it’s nothing new,” she said.
“I’m not Navalny, but I am still an antiwar activist and, obviously, the fact that they sentenced me to eight years in prison says that they are intimidated by me, at least at some level.”
Despite the real or imagined risks, others feel compelled to display their opposition.
Musonov pointed to the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, which President Alexander Lukashenko officially won with 81 per cent of the vote. A strong opposition campaign and allegations of vote-rigging resulted in mass protests that tainted his win and exposed his authoritarian tendencies.
“The entire world saw that Lukashenko was illegitimate,” Musonov said.
He hopes that defiance in Russia has served the same purpose, whether it be thousands of people lining up in the cold of winter to sign the nomination papers for Boris Nadezhdin (an independent antiwar candidate who was ultimately blocked from running), or the tens of thousands who braved the wrath of the authorities to lay flowers at memorials for Navalny.
“I hope that Canada sees that,” Musonov said.
Nadezhda Kutepova, a lawyer and Russian exile in Paris, said that protesting Putin’s re-election could be cathartic for Russians abroad who, she says, are stuck between feelings of guilt that their country invaded neighbouring Ukraine and the feeling that they are seen as traitors for abandoning Russia in one of its darkest political hours.
“Russians want to make their fight visible — to show that, yes, we left because we couldn’t stay, but we’re keeping up the fight,” she said.