Voters told to all swamp polling stations at once and spoil ballots, adding to tactics including dye attacks, fires and Ukrainian cross-border strikes
Critics of Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin regime have called for massive protests at Russian polling stations on Sunday, the final day of a presidential election that is
Before his death in an Arctic prison last month, the main Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, who galvanised mass anti-Putin rallies, urged Russians to protest on Sunday. Any public dissent in Russia has been harshly punished since the start of Moscow’s offensive in Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and there have been repeated warnings from the authorities against election protests.
The man, who declined to give his name for security reasons, said he hoped the demonstration would show the authorities “that there are people in this country against the conflict … against the regime”.Putin, 71, former KGB agent, has been in power since the last day of 1999 and is set to extend his grip over Russia until at least 2030. If he completes another Kremlin term, he would have stayed in power longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century.
The voting will wrap up in Kaliningrad, Russia’s westernmost time zone, and an exit poll is expected to be announced shortly after that. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, and more than 50 member states have slammed Moscow for holding the vote in parts of Ukraine, with Guterres saying that the “attempted illegal annexation” of those regions has “no validity” under international law.
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