Russia votes in a ‘sham’ election as Putin can be only winner
War provides a reality check as attack in Odesa kills at least 14
Voters began heading to the polls in Russia yesterday for a three-day presidential election that is internationally being regarded as a sham as it is all but certain to extend President Vladimir Putin’s rule by six more years after he stifled any dissent.
The election takes place against the backdrop of a ruthless crackdown that has crippled independent media and prominent rights groups and given Putin full control of the political system.
In other developments, a Russian missile attack hit civilian infrastructure in Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa yesterday, killing at least 14 people and wounding 46 in Moscow’s deadliest attack in weeks, Ukrainian officials said.
Russia has stepped up its strikes on the southern city in recent weeks, launching drones or missiles almost every day.
“As a result of the Russian missile attack, 14 people were killed, including local residents, a medic and a rescuer,” Oleh Kiper, the regional governor, said on the Telegram messaging app.
The medic and rescuer were killed by a second missile after rushing to the scene to treat people hurt in the initial strike, he added.
The election 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.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has made Moscow look vulnerable behind the front line. Long-range 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 from Friday through to Sunday 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 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 statebacked 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 Putin wants to use his all-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 Abbas Gallyamov, who used to work as Putin’s speechwriter.