President Vladimir Putin sealed his control over Russia for six more years on Monday with a predetermined landslide in an election that followed the harshest crackdown on the opposition and free speech since Soviet times.
While the result was never in doubt, Russians attempted to defy the inevitable outcome, heeding a call to protest Putin's repression at home and his war in Ukraine by showing up at polling stations at noon on Sunday. But from the earliest returns, it was clear Putin would extend his nearly quarter-century rule with a fifth term.
“Of course, we have lots of tasks ahead. But I want to make it clear for everyone: When we were consolidated, no one has ever managed to frighten us, to suppress our will and our self-conscience. They failed in the past and they will fail in the future,” Putin said at a meeting with his campaign staff after polls closed.
Western leaders have denounced the election as a sham, while President Volodymyr Zelenskyy particularly criticized voting in Ukrainian areas that Russia has illegally annexed, saying"everything Russia does on the occupied territory of Ukraine is a crime.” Among those heeding call was Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, who spent more than five hours in the line at the Russian Embassy in Berlin. She told reporters that she wrote her late husband’s name on her ballot.
Putin brushed off the effectiveness of the apparent protest and rejected Western criticism of the vote as he tried to turn the tables on the West, charging that the four criminal cases against U.S. Republican candidate Donald Trump were a use of the judiciary for political aims and describing denigrating democracy in the U.S. as a “catastrophe.
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