Putin claims victory in Russia’s presidential election

MOSCOW – Vladimir Putin claimed victory Sunday after cruising to re-election, with authorities reporting high voter turnout in balloting that was widely expected to bring the Russian president a fourth term.

From the Arctic to the International Space Station, Russia rolled out an elaborate presidentialelection-day spectacle on Sunday designed to show the breadth of Putin’s public support as he extends his tenure to 2024.

Putin’s opponents on Sunday’s ballot include a nationalist, a Communist and two liberals. But Putin barely campaigned, opposition activist Alexei Navalny was barred from the ballot, and a landslide victory for Putin appears certain.

Early returns showed Putin receiving 72.1 percent of the vote with 22.6 percent of the ballots counted, according to the Central Elections Commission. The runner up was Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin with 15.6 percent.

The biggest question as Russians went to the polls on Sunday was the level of turnout. While independent polls show that most Russians continue to approve of Putin as president, a lack of suspense or popular opposition candidates threatened to keep people home. The Kremlin, analysts say, is looking for Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a rally near the Kremlin in Moscow on Sunday.

high turnout to deliver legitimacy for another Putin term.

At 6 p.m. Moscow time, Russia’s Central Election Commission said, nationwide turnout stood at 59.9 percent – just above the level in the 2012 election at that time.

Russian cities have been plastered with billboards touting Sunday’s election – “Your country, our president, our choice!” Some cities made public transportation free on Sunday, and social-media posts from Russia’s far-flung regions showed free food and giveaways at polling places. In Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East, the regional government organized a food festival to coincide with the vote that, at one polling place, was to include a “presidential breakfast” featuring skim-milk oatmeal with regional pine nuts.

Putin himself cast his ballot at the Russian

Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Asked what result he was hoping for, he responded: “Any that gives me the right to fulfill the duty of president.”

Russian state TV broadcast images of lines of Russian beachgoers voting in Thailand, a polling place in the mountains of Dagestan, mothers casting their ballots at a maternity ward, and a helicopter delivering ballots to remote settlements in the Arctic. A Russian on the International Space Station was reported to have voted while in orbit. A state TV journalist reporting live from the southern city of Rostov-on-don cast his ballot on camera.

The election was being held on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea - a move core to Putin’s domestic brand as a fearless defender of Russian interests. The Ukrainian territory that Russia seized in March 2014 was voting Sunday for the Russian president for the first time after an intense propaganda campaign on the territory warning of war and same-sex marriage as the possible consequences if Putin’s power weakened.

Critics described the vote as a charade, and opposition activist Navalny has been urging his supporters to boycott the vote ever since he was barred from the ballot in December. The independent Golos electionmonitoring group broadcast a video from the city of Krasnodar that it said showed people being forced to vote by their employers. “They told us at work” to go vote, one of them said.

“Tell yourself: I don’t want to be a part of this,” Navalny urged his 2 million Twitter followers ahead of the vote. “I don’t want elections without a choice. I won’t vote for Putin or for those whom Putin picked as his sparring partners.”

While several outspoken Putin opponents were on the ballot, including liberals Ksenia Sobchak and Grigory Yavlinsky, many potential voters who dislike Putin stayed home to avoid legitimizing the election. Daria Suslina, 20, said she skipped the chance to vote in a presidential election for the first time after getting numerous appeals to do so by text and at work.