Polls open in Russian vote to extend Putin’s reign – World

Tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed and many more wounded on both sides, thousands of Ukrainian civilians are dead and Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure have suffered damage worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The West, which says Putin is a threat well beyond the former Soviet Union, has supplied Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of aid, weapons and top-level intelligence.

Western leaders accuse Putin of waging a brutal imperial-style war aimed at restoring Russia’s global clout.

War with the West

Putin casts the war as part of an existential battle with a declining and decadent West which he says humiliated Russia after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 by encroaching on what Putin considers to be Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.

That appeals to many Russians who are suspicious about the West’s politics and intentions, if not its consumer goods.

Top Kremlin officials, some sporting sweatshirts bearing the words “Putin’s Team”, speak openly of war with NATO.

Putin’s approval rating is currently 86 per cent, up from 71pc shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, according to Levada Centre, a respected Russian pollster.

Putin’s rating also jumped during the 2008 war with Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

Russian television and a sophisticated social media operation project Putin as a robust patriot and deride Western leaders such as Biden as weak, foolish and deceitful.

“For many Russians, who are partly inspired by propaganda but most importantly by their own inner convictions, Russia is in an age-old struggle with the West — and what is currently happening is an episode in this struggle,” Alexei Levinson, head of sociocultural research at Levada, told Reuters.

“Those who express such feelings in our surveys consider themselves to be participants in some way in this struggle with the West. They are like soccer fans who imagine they are participants in the soccer match.”

Prigozhin’s plane crashed on Aug 23, two months to the day since the mutiny.

Putin is leaving little to chance. Since the full-scale invasion, authorities have cracked down on any sign of dissent. Hundreds of people have been arrested for expressing their opposition and protests are banned.

State media, which dominates Russia’s airwaves, is staunchly loyal to Putin. The task of the three rival candidates is to lose. None of their approval ratings are above 6pc.

One electoral official told Boris Nadezhdin, an anti-war candidate who was barred despite garnering tens of thousands of signatures to register, that he should focus on his own failings rather than complaining.

The Kremlin’s main concern is ensuring a high turnout. Some managers at state companies have ordered employees to vote — and submit photographs of their ballot papers, six sources told Reuters. Even cash machines remind Russians to vote.

The leaders of Russia’s fragmented opposition are either abroad, in prison, silent, or dead.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, died on Feb. 16 in the “Polar Wolf” Arctic penal colony, the prison service said. His widow, Yulia, has called on Russians to turn up at polling stations at noon on March 17 to show their opposition.

Navalny had characterised Putin’s Russia as a brittle criminal state run by thieves, sycophants and spies who care only about money. He had long forecast Russia could face seismic political turmoil, including revolution.

Asked if Putin was strong or weak, Leonid Volkov, one of Navalny’s top aides said: “Dinosaurs were very strong before they were extinct.”

Shortly after speaking to Reuters in Vilnius, Volkov said he was assaulted with a hammer in an attack Lithuania blamed on Russia. The Kremlin declined to comment on the incident.

From the court, where he was sentenced last month to two and a half years in prison for “discrediting the armed forces”, veteran Russian rights activist Oleg Orlov compared Putin’s Russia to something out of a Franz Kafka or Vladimir Sorokin novel.

“Those who led our country into the pit which it is now in represent the old, the decrepit, the obsolete,” Orlov said. “They have no sense of the future only false images of the past, only mirages of ‘imperial greatness’. And they are pushing Russia backwards, back into the dystopia.”