Putin claims a new six-year term in vote condemned as not free or fair

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, waved off the criticism. “We do not agree with the United States’ assessment of the election,” Peskov said. “De facto the United States is involved in the war in Ukraine and is de facto at war with us. This is not an opinion worth listening to and not an opinion that will be of importance to us.”

On Monday, Russia’s Central Electoral Commission predictably claimed a landslide victory for Putin. With 100 percent of votes counted, the commission said Putin had won 87.28 percent — his highest tally in any of his previous four elections. In his last campaign in 2018, the authorities said he received 77.5 percent.

Putin, who took power upon Boris Yeltsin’s resignation on Dec. 31, 1999, has defied term limits since 2008 when, after serving the maximum two full terms, he swapped jobs with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Four years later, they swapped again. In 2020, Putin engineered constitutional amendments allowing him to rule until 2036.

The election commission also reported “record turnout” — with 87.1 million Russians, totaling 77.44 percent of voters — heading to the polls. Previously, the highest turnout in a Russian presidential election was recorded in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Yeltsin was elected with 74.66 percent of voters participating.

This year’s vote, amid Russia’s continuing war against Ukraine, took place one month after the sudden death of Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most formidable political rival, in an Arctic prison colony. In areas of Ukraine occupied by Russia, electoral teams accompanied by soldiers forced residents to cast ballots at gunpoint.

The electoral commission claimed that in occupied areas of Ukraine’s Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, Putin won 88.12 percent and 92.95 percent of votes respectively. Russia controls only parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — two of four Ukrainian regions it claims illegally to have annexed — and many residents are displaced.

In Russia, voting took place from Friday through Sunday, a three-day window that critics said provided ample opportunity for fraud and manipulation. In many regions, voters were encouraged to use an opaque online voting system with no mechanism to assure accuracy or safeguard against cheating.

By midafternoon Sunday, Russian electoral watchdog Golos had mapped more than 1,400 reports of potential electoral violations, including instances of vote stuffing.

In remarks after midnight following the release of preliminary results late Sunday, Putin claimed broad public support and made clear that he would continue the war in Ukraine.

But the three-day vote was marked by signs of public fury, with several Russian citizens setting fire to voting urns and polling stations and throwing liquid dye on ballots. On Sunday, thousands of people in Russia and abroad participated in the noon protest.