Putin poised to hold Russian presidency for six more years as polls open
PHOTO CAPTION: Russian President Vladimir Putin walks to deliver his annual address to the Federal Assembly, in Moscow, Russia, February 29, 2024. Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Kremlin via REUTERS
YAKUTSK, Russia (Reuters) -Russians cast their ballots across the country's 11 time zones on Friday, the start of a three-day election that is almost certain to hand Vladimir Putin six more years at the helm of the world's biggest nuclear power.
Amid the Ukraine war, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two, the 71-year-old Kremlin chief dominates Russia's political landscape and none of the other three candidates on the ballot paper presents any credible challenge.
The Kremlin says Putin, in power as president or prime minister since the last day of 1999, will win as he commands broad support for rescuing Russia from post-Soviet chaos and standing up to what it says is an arrogant, hostile West.
From Chukotka on the Pacific 6,300 km (3,900 miles) away from Moscow to the Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea bordering Poland, some of Russia's more than 190 ethnic groups turned out to vote in national costume.
In Yakutsk, an eastern Siberian city where the temperature was minus 18 degrees Celsius, the descendent of a Yukaghir shaman asked spirits to bring good luck to the winner of the election during a ceremony at one polling station.
In other Russian cities, one woman dressed up as Barbie and another came to a polling station dressed in a tiger outfit.
But the shadow of the Ukraine war hangs over the election: Russia has more than 1 million men in arms and several hundred thousand fighting a grinding artillery and drone war along the 1,000 km (600 mile) front line in Ukraine.
Three children were killed by Ukrainian shelling of the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk, the mayor said. Another was killed in the Russian region of Belgorod - a reminder of the toll of the war.
Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, who direct Russia's war effort, voted in Russia's southern military district.
More than 114 million Russians are eligible to vote, including in what Moscow calls its "new territories" - four regions of Ukraine that its forces only partly control, but which it has claimed as part of Russia. Ukraine says the staging of elections there is illegal and void.
WAR
Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine between Kyiv's forces on one side and pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russian proxies on the other.
If Putin completes a new six-year term, he will overtake Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to become Russia's longest-serving ruler since Empress Catherine the Great in the 18th century.
The West views Putin as an autocrat, a war criminal, a killer who U.S. officials say has enslaved Russia in a corrupt dictatorship that is driving it to strategic ruin.
But in Russia the war has helped Putin tighten his grip on power and boost his popularity with Russians, according to polls and interviews with senior Russian sources.
Russia's best known opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in an Arctic penal colony last month and other Kremlin critics are exiled or in jail. The opposition says the vote is a sham.
Putin is running against Communist Nikolai Kharitonov, Leonid Slutsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, and Vladislav Davankov of the New People party. Two anti-war candidates, Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova, were barred from running by the electoral commission, which cited irregularities in their paperwork.
Navalny's widow and supporters have called on people across Russia to protest by turning out to vote all at the same time at noon on Sunday in each of the country's 11 time zones.
They have presented the "Noon Against Putin" action as a way for people to express opposition without the risk of arrest, as they will be queuing up to vote legally. The Kremlin has warned people against taking part in unauthorised gatherings.
Under constitutional changes that voters approved in 2020, Putin will be eligible to run for yet another term in 2030, potentially extending his rule to 2036.
(Reporting by Reuters, writing by Mark Trevelyan/Guy FaulconbridgeEditing by Gareth Jones)
