President Vladimir Putin received 87.97% of the vote in Russia’s presidential election, according to the country’s Election Commission. This still provisional result was delivered on the basis of the counting of ballots from 24% of polling stations. It is supported by a survey by the official Vtsiom institute, relayed by state television. As expected in this election without suspense, the master of the Kremlin is heading towards a plebiscite.
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This plebiscite marks a record for someone who had always received between 64 and 68% of the votes in previous elections. The authorities had previously insisted that the Russian people must be “ United » behind its leader, presenting the Ukrainian conflict as hatched by the West to destroy Russia. The assault on Ukraine, launched by the master of the Kremlin in February 2022 and which has no end in sight despite its tens of thousands of deaths, was the backdrop to the vote, especially that attacks on Russian territory have increased this week.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Vladimir Putin a man “ drunk with power ” wants ” reign forever “. “ It is clear to everyone that this character, as has happened so often in history, is simply drunk with power and is doing everything he can to rule eternally “, declared Volodymyr Zelensky in a message on social networks, estimating that the Russian presidential election has ” no legitimacy “.
No room for contradiction
In Russia, the authorities left no room for opponents of power: the three other candidates selected were all in line with the Kremlin, whether it was Ukraine or the repression which culminated with the death of Alexeï Navalny in an Arctic prison in February. In this context, the wife of Vladimir Putin’s late critic No. 1, Yulia Navalnaïa, called on her supporters to show up in numbers by all going to vote at the same time, at noon on Sunday, against the Russian president. She herself voted after several hours of waiting in a huge crowd at the Russian embassy in Berlin.
Outside many other Russian embassies, large crowds turned out to vote at midday across the world, with tens of thousands of Russians having gone into exile since the start of the assault on Ukraine due to repression and fear to be mobilized into the army. Alexeï Navalny’s team declared that the score obtained by Vladimir Putin in the Russian presidential election had “not no connection with reality “.
In places in Moscow, as in St. Petersburg, large queues formed at the appointed time. But in front of other polling stations, the crowds did not seem particularly high. In the Moscow district of Marino, in front of the office where Alexeï Navalny once voted, a few dozen people responded to the call.
The spokesperson for Russian diplomacy, for her part, affirmed that the voters who went en masse to embassies, such as in Paris, London and Berlin, were not supporters of the opposition. “ They came to vote, seizing the opportunity that their country, Russia, offered them despite all the threats from the West “, Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram.
Hostilities in Ukraine were also invited to the ballot. The election week was notably marked by deadly airstrikes and attempted ground incursions from Ukraine into Russian territory, responses to Russia’s daily bombings and assaults against its neighbor for more than two years.