Putin was re-elected after achieving his biggest electoral victory

Russian President Vladimir Putin will remain in the Kremlin until 2030 after taking office on Sunday his biggest electoral victory since coming to powera mandate that will allow him to continue the military campaign in Ukraine and the current fight with the West.

Putin (71) received 87.2 percent of the vote, ten points more than in 2018 (76.5), during three days of voting in the eighth presidential election in Russian history since 1991.

The election results were not affected by the death in prison of the opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, for which his co-religionists hold the Kremlin responsible, nor for the raids on the Ukrainian border in recent days.

Ukraine and Western foreign ministries condemned the absence of opposition candidates and illegal voting in four Ukrainian regions annexed by the Russian military, while the Russian opposition asked the international community not to recognize the election results.

“First of all, I want to thank the citizens of Russia. We are all one team. All the citizens who went to the polling stations and voted,” he said. Putin.

As for the challenge, he pointed out that it is a priority “achieving goals within the framework of a special military operation and strengthen the Armed Forces”.

At the same time, he reminded of the criminal responsibility of those opposition supporters who decided to go to the polling stations and spoil the ballots.

Almost 100 million votes

More than 98 million Russians, out of a total of 112 million who went to the polls, voted for the re-election for the fifth term of the current president, who came to the Kremlin in 1999 after taking power from Boris Yeltsin.

With more than 68 percent of the vote counted, Putin’s victory appears to be undisputed, although he benefited from an increase in voter turnout, as 4.5 million voters came from Ukraine’s regions Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

The second candidate with the most votes was the communist Nikolay Kharitonov with 4.17 percent of the votes, followed by the representative of the New People’s Party Vladislav Davankov with 4.07 percent of the votes. The last in the fight is the ultra-nationalist Leonid Slutski, who has a total of 3.15 percent of the vote.

The opposition to the Kremlin could not participate in the elections, because the SIP did not register its candidates due to various technical reasons or formal deficiencies, and because of support for peace in Ukraine, which is an inadmissible option for the regime.

The Central Electoral Commission, which did not invite Western observers, denied that there were any serious irregularities, although independent experts and the exile press reported cases of election fraud and manipulation.