Polls Open in Russia to Extend Putin’s Reign

AFP/APP

Moscow: Russians started voting on Friday in a three-day presidential election to hand hardline leader Vladimir Putin another six-year term as fresh attacks bring the raging conflict in Ukraine further into Russian territory.

In power as president or prime minister since the final day of 1999, the former KGB agent is casting the election as a show of Russians’ loyalty and support for his military assault on Ukraine, now in its third year.

Polling stations in a country spread over 11 time zones opened at 8:00 a.m. on Friday (2000 GMT Thursday) on the Far Eastern Kamchatka peninsula and will close Sunday at 8:00 p.m. (1800 GMT) in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, wedged between EU members Poland and Lithuania.

Victory will allow Putin to stay in power until 2030, longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.

As voting started, both Moscow and Kyiv said civilians had been killed in the latest wave of overnight aerial strikes.

Putin had urged Russians to back him in the face of a “difficult period.”.

“We have already shown that we can be together, defending the freedom, sovereignty, and security of Russia… Today it is critically important not to stray from this path,” he said in a pre-election message broadcast on state TV.

The Kremlin leader’s confidence is riding high, with his troops recently securing their first territorial gains in Ukraine in nearly a year.

At home, his most strident and charismatic critic of the last decade, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison colony last month. He had been serving 19 years on “extremism” charges widely seen as retribution for his campaigning against the Kremlin.

Western governments and Kyiv have condemned the vote as a “sham” and “farce”.